US intelligence agencies believe that parties from the Ukrainian government authorized the attack on the Russian journalist Daria Dugina, the daughter of the extremist nationalist Alexander Dugin, who supports the Russian invasion, in which a car bomb was used near Moscow last August.
newspaper quoted “The New York TimesOfficials say the United States did not participate in the attack, whether by providing intelligence or other assistance.
US officials also said they had no prior knowledge of the operation and would have opposed the killing had they been consulted, blaming Ukrainian officials for the killing.
The newspaper emphasized that this careful assessment of Ukrainian complicity, which had not been previously reported, was shared within the US government circles last week.
Ukraine denied involvement in the assassination immediately following the attack, and senior officials repeated this denial when asked regarding the US intelligence assessment, according to the newspaper.
The newspaper stated that the United States is concerned that such attacks, despite being of high symbolic value, will not directly affect the course of the battles, but at the same time they might push Moscow to carry out attacks once morest senior Ukrainian officials.
The newspaper also indicated that US officials are frustrated by Ukraine’s lack of transparency regarding its military and secret plans, especially those carried out inside Russian territory.
She pointed out that since the beginning of the war, the Ukrainian security services have proven their ability to reach Russia to carry out sabotage operations, however, the killing of Dugina is one of the boldest operations so far, as it shows that Ukraine can reach prominent Russian officials.
Some US officials suspect that Dugina’s father, Alexander Dugin, was the actual target of the operation, and that the agents who carried out the operation believed he would be in the car with his daughter.
US officials have not revealed which elements of the Ukrainian government are believed to have authorized the mission, who carried out the attack, or whether President Volodymyr Zelensky gave the green light to carry it out.
When asked regarding the US intelligence assessment, the Ukrainian President’s advisor, Mykhailo Podolyak, reiterated the Ukrainian government’s denial of involvement in Dugina’s killing.
“Any killing during a war must be significant and achieve a specific, tactical or strategic objective,” Podolek told the New York Times. “A person like Dugina is not a tactical or strategic target for Ukraine.”
Daria Dugina was killed when a bomb planted in her car, which she was driving on a highway in the suburbs of Moscow, exploded last August.
Moscow said that Ukrainian intelligence orchestrated the assassination. But Kyiv denied the accusations.
Daria’s father, Alexander Dugin, 60, became famous in Russia in the 1990s amid the intellectual chaos left by the collapse of the communist regime.
Dugin distinguished himself by embracing the anti-liberal “neo-Eurasian” doctrine, according to which Moscow is called to liberate the world from the deviations of the West by establishing an empire stretching from Europe to Asia.
Dugin, who has many television looks and is known for his long beard that gives him features similar to those of prophets, boasts that he has an ideological influence on Putin.
Many believe that Dugin played a role in straining relations between Putin and the West, and they called him “Putin’s brain”.
Born in 1992, Daria followed in the footsteps of her father Alexander, and in recent years her name has risen in the Russian media. Borrowing the name of Daria Platonova, she cooperated with the network “Russia Today” and the conservative “Tsargrad” channel in particular.
