Since Wednesday the New York Times reportedthat according to the assessment of the US secret services Ukraine is behind the murder of the Russian ultra-nationalist Darja Dugina, many are likely to repeat that Statements by the Russian secret service FSB about the alleged organization of the murder committed on August 21 in Moscow read: According to the FSB, the 33-year-old Ukrainian Natalia W. traveled to Russia on July 23, accompanied by her 12-year-old daughter Sofia.
The authorities were therefore not suspicious, since the Ukrainian’s Mini-Cooper drove with license plates of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”, the puppet republic organized by the Kremlin in 2014. In Moscow, W. rented the same house as Darja Dugina. Eight days after W., the 34-year-old Ukrainian Bogdan Z. entered via Estonia and provided W. with additional license plates from Kazakhstan and Ukraine as well as a “really false” passport – a passport of the real Kazakh citizen Julia S.
In a rented garage in southwest Moscow, Z. and W. put together a car bomb that W. planted under Dugina’s car on August 21, when she was the guest of honor at the nationalist festival “Tradition.” On the day of the attack in which Dugina died, W. left the country via Estonia with her daughter by car and now had Ukrainian license plates. Z. left Russia a day later, according to the FSB.
Indeed, these details speak in favor of an organization by a state actor. Political assassinations abroad by secret services of former Soviet countries are not uncommon. The Belarusian secret service KGB, for example, is said to be in Kyiv in August 2021 Belarusian opposition figure Vitaly Shizhov was murdered to have. In Russia, foreign assassinations of this type are carried out both by the military intelligence service GRU (e.g. the assassination of the Chechen Selimkhan Yandarbiyev in Qatar in 2004) and the FSB (2006 the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko in London). In Ukraine, for example, the Russians are said to be in 2017 Colonel Maksim Shapoval of the Ukrainian military intelligence service HUR and Colonel Oleksandr Kharaberiush of the Ukrainian intelligence service SBU were assassinated to have.
The SBU has had a hit squad for years
But also that at least 32,000-strong Ukrainian secret service SBU is not an innocent lamb. Until 2018, the SBU even played a leading role in the war in eastern Ukraine, disguised as an “anti-terrorist operation”. When on August 31, 2018 Alexander Zakharchenko, the “President” of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”, was blown up, saw the “People’s Republic” the 5th department of the SBU “counterintelligence” behind. The SBU allegedly carried out other murders of Moscow collaborators in the “People’s Republic”.
In addition to the SBU, the Ukrainian army also set up a sabotage and killer unit after 2015. This special operations forces allowed to train partisans according to a 2021 law and pay to operate on Ukrainian territory in case of war. The “Center for National Resistance” issued instructions for successful partisan operations. Since the occupation of parts of the Cherson and Zaporizhia regions, a number of Ukrainians collaborating with Moscow and officials sent from Russia were killed been.
A murder in Moscow is more likely to be the task of the SBU. If the details claimed by the FSB are correct, that would speak in favor of an organization by professionals from the SBU, for example. However, it is still unclear whether the murderers actually wanted to kill Darja Dugina with the car bomb or not rather her father Alexander Dugin. Dugin is a prominent ultranationalist who has called on Russians to fight Ukrainians with battle cries of “kill, kill, kill.” And if the murder was actually organized by Kyiv – then who ordered it?
In the US, it is the President who approves the assassination of terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. If Kyiv is behind Darya Dugina’s death, then President Volodymyr Zelenskiy may have approved the attack. He reports to both the supreme commander of the armed forces and the head of the SBU. However, Zelensky’s advisor, Mykhailo Podoliak, has denied that Ukraine was behind the murder.
In Moscow, shortly after the murder, Kremlin propagandist Margarita Simonian called for Ukrainian “decision centers” to be bombed in revenge for Dugina’s death. Of course, Russia does that anyway with cruise missiles and rockets. A notorious example is the completely destroyed seat of the regional administration in Kharkiv. The huge headquarters of the SBU in the center of Kyiv, on the other hand, is just as intact as the parliament and the presidential palace.