Daughter of 'spiritual guide' to Putin's Ukraine invasion killed in Moscow 'car bomb plot meant for her father’

21 August 2022, 07:59 | Updated: 21 August 2022, 10:31

The daughter of a close ally of Vladimir Putin has been killed in a suspected car bomb attack near Moscow, it is understood.

Darya Dugin, daughter of “Putin’s brain” Alexander Dugin, 60, died in the suspected assassination plot that was meant for her father.

She is believed to have been killed in a blast near the village of Bolshiye Vyazyomy last night.

Footage from the scene of the blast shows her Land Cruiser Prado engulfed in flames by a roadside with emergency vehicles nearby.

Alexander Dugin, a Russian philosopher who is an ultra-nationalist close to Putin, is believed to have been the intended target.

According to Russian media, the pair were due to travel back from an event in the same car but Mr Dugin decided at the last minute to travel separately from his daughter.

Unverified footage purportedly shows Mr Dugin arriving at the scene of the burning vehicle.

Russian emergency services confirmed to the Tass news agency that a woman had died when an SUV exploded, but confirmed no further details.

Commenting on Dugin, the US Treasury says he is “responsible for or complicit in actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, stability, or sovereignty or territorial integrity of Ukraine”.

It added: “Dugin was a leader of the Eurasian Youth Union, which actively recruited individuals with military and combat experience to fight on behalf of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic and has stated that it has a covert presence in Ukraine.

“Dugin controls Geopolitica, a website that serves as a platform for Russian ultra-nationalists to spread disinformation and propaganda targeting Western and other audiences.”

Ms Dugin’s father has been branded “Putin’s Rasputin” over his links to the Russian President.

Darya was a prominent journalist in Russia who vocally backed the invasion of Ukraine. In an interview in May she said the war was a “clash of civilisations” and said she was proud that she had been sanctioned along with her father, by Western nations.

Her father formerly edited the pro-Putin Tsargrad TV network and is regarded as Putin’s ‘guru adviser’ and reportedly has heavy influence over him.

The apparent assassination attempt comes after Russian authorities claimed they shot down Ukrainian drones on Saturday in Crimea after a strike on the Russian’s Black Sea Navy HQ.

Read more: Downtown Kyiv turned into open-air museum of burned-out and captured Russian tanks

Read more: Huge explosion as ‘Ukrainian drone strike’ rocks Russia’s Black Sea navy HQ

Ukrainian officials said Russian forces continued to attempt to seize one of the few cities in eastern Ukraine not already under their control.

The Russian military also kept up its strikes in Ukraine's north and south.

In Crimea, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014, Russian authorities said local air defences shot down a drone above the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.

It was the second drone incident at the headquarters in three weeks and followed explosions at a Russian airfield and ammunition depot on the peninsula this month.

Oleg Kryuchkov, an aide to Crimea's governor, also said on Saturday that "attacks by small drones" triggered air-defence systems in western Crimea.

"Air defence systems successfully hit all targets over the territory over Crimea on Saturday morning. There are no casualties or material damage," his boss, Sergei Aksyonov, said on Telegram.

Sevastopol governor Mikhail Razvozhaev said on Telegram that the city's air-defence systems were called into action again late on Saturday.

The incidents underlined Russian forces' vulnerability in Crimea. A drone attack on Russia's Black Sea naval headquarters on July 31 injured five people and forced the cancellation of observances of Russia's Navy Day.

This week, a Russian ammunition depot in Crimea was hit by an explosion. Last week, nine Russian warplanes were reported destroyed at an airbase on Crimea.

Ukrainian authorities have stopped short of publicly claiming responsibility. But president Volodymyr Zelensky alluded to Ukrainian attacks behind enemy lines after the blasts in Crimea.

Meanwhile, fighting in southern Ukrainian areas just north of Crimea has stepped up in recent weeks as Ukrainian forces try to drive Russian forces out of cities they have occupied since early in the six-month-old war.

A Russian missile attack wounded 12 people, including three children, and damaged houses and an apartment block on Saturday in the town of Voznesensk in the Mykolaiv region, the Ukrainian prosecutor's office said.

Two of the children were in serious condition and the governor said one had lost an eye.

A Ukrainian airstrike, meanwhile, hit targets in Melitopol, the largest Russian-controlled city in the Zaporizhzhia region 65 miles north of Crimea, according to Ukrainian and Russia-installed local officials.

The Ukrainian military on Saturday said it had destroyed a prized Russian radar system and other equipment stationed in occupied areas in the southern Zaporizhzhia region. It was not clear if this was the strike on Melitopol.

"Tonight, there were powerful explosions in Melitopol, which the whole city heard," the Ukrainian mayor of Melitopol, Ivan Ferodov, said. "According to preliminary data, (it was) a precise hit on one of the Russian military bases, which the Russian fascists are trying to restore for the umpteenth time in the airfield area."

In the east, Ukraine's military General Staff said on Saturday that intensified combat took place around Bakhmut, a small city whose capture would enable Russia to threaten the two largest remaining Ukrainian-held cities in the eastern Donbas region.

Bakhmut for weeks has been a key target of Moscow's eastern offensive as the Russian military tries to complete a months-long campaign to conquer all of the Donbas, where pro-Moscow separatists have proclaimed two republics that Russia recognised as sovereign states at the beginning of the war.

A local Ukrainian official reported sustained fighting on Saturday near four settlements on the border of Luhansk and Donetsk provinces, which together make up the contested Donbas region.

Luhansk governor Serhii Haidai did not name the settlements. Russian forces overran nearly all of Luhansk last month and since then have focused on capturing Ukrainian-held areas of Donetsk.

Russian shelling killed seven civilians on Friday in Donetsk province, including four in Bakhmut, governor Pavlo Kyrylenko wrote on Saturday on Telegram.

Taking Bakhmut would give the Russians room to advance on the province's main Ukrainian-held cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.

Ukraine said Sloviansk and Kramatorsk were targeted on Friday, along with the Kharkiv region to the north, home to Ukraine's second-largest city.

Local authorities reported renewed Russian shelling overnight along a broad front, including the northern Kharkiv and Sumy regions, which border Russia, as well as of the eastern Dnipropetrovsk region and Mykolaiv.