The Russian authorities on Monday blamed Ukraine for organizing the killing of Daria Dugina, the ultranationalist daughter of a outstanding Russian supporter of the invasion, a declare that raised fears of an additional escalation within the six-month warfare.
Ukraine has denied having something to do with the automotive bombing on Saturday that killed Ms. Dugina, 29, on a freeway in an prosperous district exterior of Moscow.
Russia’s home intelligence company, the F.S.B., issued an announcement on Monday saying that the assault “was ready and dedicated by the Ukrainian intelligence businesses.” The company’s claims couldn’t be independently verified.
Some Russian media experiences had mentioned that Ms. Dugina’s father, Aleksandr Dugin, an ultranationalist author who helped construct the ideological basis for President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, was the probably goal of the blast.
However the F.S.B.’s assertion described Ms. Dugina — herself a hawkish commentator who had earned a following with frequent appearances on state media — because the meant goal.
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Quickly after the F.S.B.’s announcement, the Kremlin revealed a letter of sympathy from Mr. Putin to Ms. Dugina’s dad and mom, the Russian chief’s first assertion concerning the assault. “A vile, merciless crime ended the lifetime of Daria Dugina — a vivid, gifted particular person with an actual Russian coronary heart,” Mr. Putin wrote, making no point out of the perpetrators or of Ukraine. “She proved in her actions what it means to be a patriot of Russia.”
In its assertion, the F.S.B. alleged {that a} Ukrainian girl had been contracted to hold out the bombing, saying that she had entered Russia on July 23 and rented an house within the Moscow constructing the place Ms. Dugina lived “so as to manage the homicide of Dugina and procure details about her way of life.” The girl was on the similar nationalist pageant attended by Ms. Dugina and her father on Saturday earlier than the bombing, the company mentioned.
Ukraine’s presidential adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, tweeted that the F.S.B. assertion was “propaganda” from a “fictional world.”
The F.S.B. additionally alleged that the perpetrator of the bombing had left Russia for Estonia, later releasing video footage of what it mentioned confirmed her in a grey Mini Cooper crossing the border. The Estonian Overseas Ministry mentioned it had no speedy remark. However the F.S.B.’s declare was prone to additional inflame tensions with the Baltic nation, which has been amongst Europe’s main critics of the Kremlin.
A senior Russian lawmaker, Vladimir Dzhabarov, mentioned on Monday that if Estonia didn’t hand over the lady, there could be “each motive for the Russian Federation to take powerful actions in opposition to the Estonian state.”
The automotive bombing got here on the heels of a spate of Ukrainian assaults deep behind the entrance line in Crimea, and the F.S.B.’s accusations heightened the clamor among the many warfare’s most ardent cheerleaders to escalate the combating and punish President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
“The Zelensky regime should be destroyed,” Sergei Mironov, a hawkish chief within the Russian parliament, mentioned in a state tv interview. “What the Ukrainian intelligence businesses are doing as we speak on the orders of Zelensky is terrorism in its truest type.”
However the F.S.B. assertion could also be unlikely to persuade critics of Mr. Putin that Ukraine was certainly behind the crime. Coming simply over 36 hours after the blast, the company’s declaration that it had “solved” the crime represented an awfully fast investigation in comparison with different high-profile assassinations — like these of the opposition chief Boris Nemtsov in 2015 or of the unbiased journalist Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, circumstances that stay unsolved.
And the company has been accused of staging assaults for political ends. 20 years in the past, the F.S.B. was accused of involvement in bombings of house buildings in Moscow that killed greater than 300 individuals and touched off Russia’s invasion of the republic of Chechnya. These accusations had been by no means confirmed. On the time, residents in Ryazan, 115 miles from Moscow, mentioned they’d discovered intelligence brokers planting explosives beneath an house constructing, prompting the F.S.B. to apologize and assert that the fabric in query was sugar sacks and that the incident was a safety train.
Andrew Higgins contributed reporting.
