(MENAFN- Asia Times)
Western media is spinning the August 20 car bombing of Darya Dugina, the daughter of“Eurasionist” ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, as an attack on Vladimir Putin's“spiritual guide” (CNN) and“brain” (Foreign Affairs) – implicitly a violent blow against the Putin regime.
That fits the longstanding and long-discredited view promoted by Western chancelleries that the Russian president won't survive the Ukraine war due to growing domestic opposition.
This self-serving reading of the murder—repeatedly endlessly in the English-language media– doesn't square with the known facts or best-practice inference. Although information remains fragmentary, what we do know makes clear that the origin and intent of the Dugina assassination must be sought elsewhere.
What we know, or can infer with a high degree of certainty, is the following:
Aleksandr Dugin is not a Putin ally, but a strident critic of Putin's stance toward the West. Dugin himself was the target of the assassination, not his daughter; the young woman had the misfortune to drive her father's car after a speaking event in Moscow while her father rode in a different vehicle. The bombing was amateurish, the work of either terror cells or ordinary criminals, according to sources with knowledge of the thinking of Russian security services. The Russian state knows how to eliminate undesirables, and they do so in more efficient ways—and do not miss.“If Putin wanted to kill Dugin,” said one analyst familiar with state security methods,“it would have been done differently, and for sure.” It is unlikely in the extreme that the Ukraine government carried out the bombing, as a spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry speculated. Eliminate the impossible, as Sherlock Holmes said, and what remains, however improbable, must be true. Russian opponents of Putin—such as they are—had no reason to kill a messianic ideologue who had become an annoyance to the Russian leader.
Putin might have had a reason to eliminate Dugin, but the bungled operation is most uncharacteristic of state security. If criminals were involved, the contract on Dugin could have been ordered anywhere in the world.
Alexander Dugin at the scene of his daughter's death in a car bomb likely meant for him. Image: Twitter
To repeat, Dugin was not a Putin ally – quite the contrary. He was fired from his teaching job at Moscow University in 2014, an action that required Putin's sign-on. Although Dugin supported what the Russian state calls a“special military operation” in Ukraine, he vituperated against Putin's circle of advisers.
In his latest Telegram and blog posts dated August 20, just before the death of his daughter, Dugin declared that the“status quo regime” in Moscow—Putin's present cabinet—won't last six months and that Russia would undergo an apocalyptic transformation. Dugin's statements border on a call for regime change against Putin.
“The SMO [Special Military Operation] has changed everything,” Dugin wrote.“The question is no longer whether the government wants to change or not. … Such changes simply are inevitable. Even if you fight to the death against their coming, they cannot be delayed by more than six months. And then they will come anyway,” Dugin posted on Telegram.
He added:“With the beginning of the Special Military Operation, the regime of history itself changed irreversibly: a new ontological vector appeared that cannot be dissolved by arbitrariness or decree. The mighty forces of history have come into play, the tectonic plates have shifted. Let the old regime bury its dead. A new Russian time is coming. Relentlessly. [Translation by Asia Times; emphasis added].
In a blog post the same day, Dugin declared,“The Special Military Operation as a philosophical phenomenon marks the return of the Empire–the return of Russia to Empire, the complete restoration of our messianic future destiny.… We are the Orthodox bearers of the Eurasian Empire of the End.”
Dugin refers to the Messianic Russian claim that after the fall of Rome and Byzantium, Moscow, as a Third Rome, is the last bastion of civilization.
The Putin who proposed the Minsk II compromise in Ukraine—autonomy for the Russian-speaking regions within a sovereign Ukraine—is worlds apart from the ideologue who prophesizes a Russian-centered End Times.
The impossible (or nearly impossible) alternatives to eliminate are:
A hit by Russian state security services at the behest of Putin. Although Putin disliked Dugin, he had no reason to kill him, and if he had wanted Dugin dead, Dugin (and not his daughter) would be dead; A hit by Russian opposition elements with the intent of hurting Putin. As noted, Dugin was an annoyance to Putin, not a help; and An operation on Russian soil by a foreign intelligence agency; the United States, Britain, or Ukraine almost certainly do not have such capabilities on the ground in Russia. By process of elimination, we are left with two possible groups of perpetrators, namely Russian organized crime or terrorist elements. Islamist terrorists have conducted attacks in Moscow, but it is improbable in the extreme that they would choose Dugin as a target.
Dugin has a positive view of Islamist opposition to American hegemony, and attacked Putin's harsh suppression of Chechnyan Islamists, who he viewed as an expression of traditional society's opposition to globalism.
If Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Dugin's assassination, he would not likely have missed. Photo: Sputnik / Mikhail Metzel
If we scratch terrorists off the list, the last remaining item is Russian organized crime, possibly with connections to Russian oligarchs abroad. Russian criminals have no reason to undertake political assassinations, risking the unwanted attention of the security services.
The obvious inference is that if criminals perpetrated the botched attempt on Aleksandr Dugin, they did so at the behest of others, presumably oligarchs resident abroad but with continuing connections to criminal elements inside Russia.
Where oligarchs reside, where their property is located and where they might be subject to official pressure are the questions to ask in order to take the chain of inference closer to the origin of the order to kill Aleksandr Dugin.
Follow David P. Goldman on Twitter at @davidpgoldman and Uwe Parpart at @uwe_parpart
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