Russian Spy Agency F.S.B Claims Ukraine Killed Daria Dugina

On Monday, Russian authorities accused Ukraine of orchestrating the murder of Daria Dugina, the ultra-nationalist daughter of a prominent Russian supporter of the invasion, an allegation that fueled fears of a further escalation of the six-month war.

Ukraine has denied having anything to do with Saturday’s car bombing that killed 29-year-old woman Dugina on a highway in an affluent neighborhood outside Moscow and was committed by the Ukrainian secret services.” The agency’s claims could not be independently verified”.

Some Russian media reports had said that Ms Dugina’s father, Aleksandr Dugin, an ultranationalist writer who helped lay the ideological basis for President Vladimir V Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, was likely the target of the blast.

But the F.S.B statement described Ms.Dugina, herself an uncompromising commentator who had built a following through frequent appearances in state media, was the intended target.

Shortly after F.S.B announcement, the Kremlin released a letter of condolences from Mr. Putin to Ms. Dugina. Parents,

The Russian leader’s first statements about the attack. “A heinous and cruel crime ended the life of Daria Dugina, a brilliant and talented person with a true Russian heart,” Putin wrote, without mentioning the perpetrators or Ukraine.

She showed through her actions what it means to be a patriot of Russia.

In her statement, F.S.B claimed that a Ukrainian woman was hired to carry out the attack and said that she entered Russia on July 23 and rented an apartment in the Moscow building where Ms. Dugina “to organize Dugina’s murder and get information about her lifestyle.

The woman was at the same nationalist festival that Dugina and her father attended on Saturday before the attack, the agency said.

Ukrainian Presidential Advisor Mykhailo Podolyak tweeted that F.’s statement was “propaganda” from a “fictional world”.

F.S.B also claimed that the assassin left Russia for Estonia, and later released video footage of what showed her crossing the border in a gray Mini Cooper. The Estonian Foreign Ministry said it had no immediate comment.

But F.B.S allegation is likely to further fuel tensions with the Baltic nation, which is among the leading critics of the Kremlin in Europe.

A senior Russian lawmaker, Vladimir Dzhabarov, said on Monday that if Estonia did not extradite the woman, there would be “many reasons for the Russian Federation to crack down on the Estonian state”.

A series of Ukrainian attacks deep behind the front lines in Crimea, and F.’s allegations sparked an outcry among the war’s most ardent cheerleaders to step up the fight and punish Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

“The Zelensky regime must be destroyed,” Sergei Mironov, an uncompromising leader in the Russian parliament, said in an interview on state television. “What the Ukrainian secret services are doing today on Zelenskyy’s orders is terrorism in its purest form.”

But F.S.B testimony is unlikely to convince Putin’s critics that Ukraine is really behind the crime. Just over 36 hours after the blast, the agency’s statement that it had “solved” the crime marked an extraordinarily quick turnaround.

The investigation compared to other high-profile killings such as those of opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2015 or freelance journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, cases that are still unsolved. And the agency has been accused of organizing attacks for political purposes.

Two decades ago, F.S.B was accused of involvement in Moscow apartment building bombings that killed more than 300 people and sparked Russia’s invasion of the Chechen Republic. These allegations were never confirmed.

At the time, residents of Ryazan, 115 miles from Moscow, said they found intelligence agents planting explosives under an apartment building, prompting F.S.B to apologize and claim the material in question was bags of sugar and that the incident was a security drill been.