Daughter of 'Putin's Rasputin' Alexander Dugin killed in mystery Moscow car bomb

A car bomb near Moscow has killed the daughter of the ultra-nationalist Russian philosopher behind Vladimir Putin’s aggressive expansionist strategies that propelled him to invade Ukraine.

Alexander Dugin may have been the intended target of the bomb that killed his daughter, Darya, as she was driving home from a festival outside Moscow where her father had just given a lecture.

Video showed Mr Dugin - known as “Putin’s brain” and even “Putin’s Rasputin” - holding his hands to his head in disbelief as he stood staring at the burning car. Eyewitnesses reported a large explosion and Russian officials said that 30-year-old Darya died instantly.

“An explosive device allegedly installed in a Toyota Landcruiser car went off at full speed on a public highway, and then the car caught fire,” said Russia’s investigation committee. “The girl who was driving died at the scene.”

The Kremlin has not commented but pro-Russia rebels in Donbas have blamed Ukraine for the assassination.

The Russian opposition news agency Baza said that Mr Dugin had planned to catch a lift back into Moscow after speaking at the Tradition Festival with his daughter but changed his mind at the last minute.

Pro-Ukraine partisans have stepped up their attacks on Russian targets over the past couple of months.

They have assassinated several pro-Russia officials in occupied parts of southern Ukraine and attacked ammunition depots and airfields in Crimea, which Russia annexed in 2014.

There have also been reports of arson attacks on army recruiting centres in Russia and sabotage attacks on the railway network used by the Kremlin to send its armies to Ukraine but nobody had considered that partisans would target Kremlin insiders living in Moscow.

Mr Dugin, who wore a long beard in the Slavic style, was hated by Ukrainians.

He was an arch-advocate of an aggressive Russian policy towards its neighbours. The basis of his philosophy was that for a Slavic nation to survive wedged between Europe and Asia it needed to propagate a violent approach to nation-building that challenged it to destroy its neighbours and then rebuild in its own image.

Mr Putin is said to have been taken with this philosophy and adopted it, using it to partly justify his invasion of Ukraine.

Mr Dugin whole-heartedly supported Mr Puitn’s invasion of Ukraine in February, as well as his annexation of Crimea in 2014.

He criticised Mr Putin for not being aggressive enough when he invaded Georgia in 2008 by not capturing Tbilisi and forcing the overthrow of Georgia’s then-president Mikheil Saakashvili.

Mr Dugin does not hold an official position within the Kremlin but is considered highly influential and has been called “Putin’s brain” and even “Putin’s Rasputin”, a reference to the self-proclaimed holy man and Christian pilgrim who held such great influence over the wife of Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II.

Darya Dugina, Mr Dugin’s daughter, was a journalist and both supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and her father’s aggressive foreign policy philosophies.