The Dugina killing aftermath

Obviously, this doesn’t mean that the car bomb was a message to Dugin in response to his Telegram post from a few hours earlier. But it seems more than likely that Dugin was not merely expressing his personal brand of crazy but channeling the view of a faction of “hawks” in Russian government structures. If so, that brings us back to the theory of New Times editor Victor Davidoff (which I mentioned in my first article on Dugina’s assassination) that the bombing is a strike in a war of “Kremlin towers,” intended either to kill Dugin or to send him a warning.

Former KGB officer Sergey Zhirnov, who once worked with the intelligence agency’s “Illegals’ Directorate” familiar to many people from The Americans and who currently lives in France, voiced the same theory in a YouTube interview with Latvia-based journalist Vadim Radionov: the most likely explanation for the murder, he said, was “infighting” among the restive elites increasingly unhappy with the fiasco of the war. If so, this episode could be a sign of coming intra-elite conflict and regime instability.

Zhirnov also mentioned the creepiest theory of all: that Dugin himself helped orchestrate his daughter’s murder in order to boost his own prestige as a patriot, both as a presumed target of the hit and as the bereaved father of a young patriotic martyr. Of course, that’s pretty far-fetched even for Dugin, who seemed genuinely distraught at the wake.