Russia blames Ukraine for nationalist’s car bombing death

Russia’s top counterintelligence agency yesterday blamed Ukrainian spy services for organizing the killing of the daughter of a leading Russian nationalist ideologue in a car bombing just outside Moscow.

Daria Dugina, the 29-year-old daughter of Alexander Dugin, a philosopher, writer and political theorist whom some in the West described as “Putin’s brain,” died when an explosive planted in her SUV exploded as she was driving Saturday night.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the main KGB successor agency, said that Dugina’s killing had been “prepared and perpetrated by the Ukrainian special services.”

On Sunday, Ukraine’s presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak denied any Ukrainian involvement in the killing.

In Monday’s statement, the FSB accused a Ukrainian citizen, Natalya Vovk, of perpetrating the killing and then fleeing from Russia to Estonia.

The FSB said that the suspect, Natalya Vovk, arrived in Russia in July with her 12-year-old daughter and rented an apartment in the building where Dugina lived to shadow her. It said that Vovk and her daughter were at a nationalist festival, which Alexander Dugin and his daughter attended just before the killing.