Russia blames Ukraine for death of Kremlin ideologue's daughter

Russia’s top counterintelligence agency has accused Ukrainian spy agencies of organising the killing of the daughter of a Russian political scientist and philosopher.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the main KGB successor agency, said on Monday that the killing of Darya Dugina has been “prepared and perpetrated by the Ukrainian special services.”

Dugina was the daughter of Alexandr Dugin, a Russian intellectual who was described by some in the West as “Putin’s brain.”

The FSB charged that the killing was perpetrated by a Ukrainian citizen, who left Russia for Estonia after the killing. 

According to the FSB, the suspect, Natalya Vovk, rented an apartment in the building where Dugina lived and shadowed her.

Vovk and her daughter were at a festival, which Alexandr Dugin and his daughter attended just before the killing.

Ukraine has previously denied any involvement in the killing.

On Monday, Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed his "sincere condolences" following her death.

"A vile, cruel crime ended the life of Daria Dugina, a bright, talented person with a real Russian heart — kind, loving, sympathetic and open," Putin said in a message to Dugina's family released by the Kremlin.

READ MORE: Car bomb kills daughter of Putin ally Alexandr Dugin in Moscow

Homicide investigation

Dugina, born in 1992, was killed on Saturday night when a bomb placed in the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving went off as she was returning from a cultural festival she had attended with her father.

Family members quoted by Russian media said Dugina had borrowed her father's car at the last minute.

She was driving on a highway near the village of Bolshie Vyzyomy, some 40 kilometres outside Moscow, Russia's Investigative Committee said in a statement.

Dugina died on the scene and a homicide investigation was opened, according to the committee, which probes major crime cases in Russia.

Alexandr Dugin's exact ties to Putin are unclear, but the Kremlin frequently echoes rhetoric from his writings and appearances on Russian state TV.

He has long advocated for the unification of Russian-speaking territories in a vast new Russian empire and wholeheartedly supported Moscow's operation in Ukraine. 

He was put on a Western sanctions list after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, a move he also backed.

Dugina expressed similar views and was sanctioned by the United States in March for her work as chief editor of United World International, a website that the US described as a disinformation site.

READ MORE: Which political thoughts inspire today’s Vladimir Putin?