Today, Explained - Putin’s war comes to Russia

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

A car bomb killed Russian commentator Darya Dugina over the weekend. The bomb may have been meant for her father, the far-right, pro-Putin, pro-war philosopher Alexander Dugin. The Guardian’s Andrew Roth explains. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and edited and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained  Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The U.S. State Department is telling Americans to get out of Ukraine. It's a big week there. The country's Independence Day is on Wednesday, but Ukraine has canceled all celebrations. It's also the six-month anniversary of the start of the war. Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky issued a warning in his weekly address that, quote, this week Russia might try to do something particularly nasty, particularly cruel. Pressure has been building after a mysterious targeted murder on a highway last weekend. A 29-year-old woman killed in a car bombing, not in Ukraine, where all the violence

of this war has occurred, but outside of Moscow, in a nice area even. She wasn't a household name in Russia yet, but the murder of Darya Dugina and the revenge that many people believe will accompany it could signal the opening of a new and scarier front in Russia's war. Next on Today Explained. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style,

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Andrew Roth is Moscow correspondent for The Guardian. He's been following the apparent assassination of Darya Dugina closely. Andrew, tell us what you know. So Darya Dugina was leaving a festival on Saturday evening. And as she drove away from this kind of big sort of right-wing political festival, she was driving on her way back to Moscow when all of a sudden her car exploded. It was a sort of massive explosion that tore through the car and she was killed at the scene of the explosion. Russian authorities say she was likely murdered, a bomb placed under her seat. The question is why? So Daria Dugina is, first of all, a political commentator. This is a person who would go on television, and she was pretty

conservative in what she said. And in Russia right now, that means that she was fairly pro-war, meaning the war against Ukraine. Russian state television's tribute to Daria Dugina, killed in a car bomb on Saturday night. A signal to us all, the presenter says. She died for her views. She died for the idea of the Russian world. She'd been very outspoken about her opposition of the government in Kiev and her support, basically, for the Kremlin fighting in Ukraine. She says people in the West are living in a dream, and they need to be nourished by this war. But the other thing that makes her important is who her father is.

Alexander Dugin is probably one of the better-known political thinkers, pundits in Russia, and he's best known as an extremely conservative, some would call him fascist, thinker on the Russian far-right. To people in the know, Alexander Dugin, a philosopher and Russian public intellectual, matters because he says what Putin thinks. So Alexander Dugin is best known for this idea of neo-Eurasianism, which I guess you could call a version of Russian exceptionalism.

This was a person who was fanatical. At times he was viewed almost as a kind of huckster, a person who could always be relied on to come out with an ultra-nationalist point of view about any conflict. So this is a person who was born into a military family, but kind of came into his own in the 80s when there were anti-communist movements coming out, and this united a bunch of different people.

And by the 1990s, Dugin, along with another writer, who was well-known in Russia, Edward Limonov, founded a movement that basically united far-left and far-right ideologies. Russia's disparate opposition has been left to unite under the umbrella of the other Russia, an organization that includes an array of political opinion in the country. It was a kind of communist fascist movement that was violent in its ideology,

opposed to the kind of liberalism under Yeltsin, and supported a kind of much harder, different version of Russia that was much more aggressive, particularly in places like Ukraine, which they saw as sort of an inexorable part of Russia, a part of Russia that should remain. It's around this time in the late 1990s that Dugin publishes what's probably his best known book. So in 1997, you wrote a book called Foundations of Geopolitics. And in it, you talked about how Russia should return to being a global superpower. This is really where he lays out these ideas of why Russia is different, why there's this kind of clash of civilizations with the West, and why Russia shouldn't really turn away from that idea, but it has to embrace its Russian-ness, let's say, this idea of

empire. I always believed and I believe in the future greatness of Russia because Russia was always and tried to be a superpower. In some places there are reports that this text is being used either in the military or in certain police groups, basically amongst what you might call syloviki in Russia, people involved in the security state, who have more nostalgia, I think, for the strong Soviet Union and wanted to see some sort of strong Russia arise in its place. So Dugin is out here with these very radical and very strong ideas already in the 1990s. But I don't think it's totally

correct to say that he and Vladimir Putin see eye to eye in terms of most ideas of what Russia should become or in the sort of rise of what we would call Putinism. You know, for Putin, especially in the first decade of the time that he was in power, his control was really rooted, first of all, to a kind of social contract with the public, where he ensured stability by fighting against the oligarchy that had grown in the 1990s, against the kind of massive wealth inequality that had taken place. And in response, Russians who get to enjoy Western comforts would kind of just leave politics to him, and they would kind of step away from the political realm. So in many ways, Dugin doesn't fit in there.

The moment that Dugin becomes more important really comes in 2014, when all of a sudden these views about clash of civilization really come to a head, because this is the moment when Russia annexes Crimea. U.S. defense officials are keeping a very close watch on eastern Ukraine tonight as thousands of Russian troops gather on the border. To quote one defense official, it's like they're on a hair trigger. You know, you can divide Putin's time in power into pre and post Crimea because it's such an important shift for the country.

It's no longer about trading prosperity for political control. It's about re-embracing an idea of empire and re-embracing maybe some of these ideas that Dugan thought were so important. As time goes on, Dugan trades on this. He really wants to portray himself as somebody who's incredibly powerful, incredibly influential. But I would say that Dugan's influence has always been kind of disputed. Is it because of him that these ideas started to take root in the Kremlin? We don't really think so. You know, Dugan has no photographs with Putin. They've never been seen together. And Dugan is a bit of a huckster. You know, if we look at Trump world, he might remind you of someone like a Sebastian Gorka, a person

who claims to have, you know, power and influence and access. But maybe it's just somebody who is effective at claiming that he knew what was going to happen next, of catching on to trends and kind of picking up on them quite effectively. So even though Dugan had kind of come into the right moment, he almost overplayed his hand a little bit. He came out with some very inflammatory comments uh saying that he wants to see russians kill kill kill ukrainians they were so inflammatory that he ended up losing his job uh at moscow state university where he held a position at that point so since since then, he's a person who has been on the fringes of the political power. He's somebody who seems to have captured something

about the mood, the directions that Russia is moving in. But it's somebody who has always been held at arm's length. And I would say who remains kind of on the fringes of power in Russia. He's more of a curiosity than somebody who is really running the country. When Russia invaded Ukraine and took this very aggressive action, do you think Alexander Dugin was somewhere in the back of or in the front of Vladimir Putin's mind? I think almost certainly not. I don't think that Dugin was directly influencing Putin at that point.

But these ideas about conflict, these ideas that the Ukrainian state doesn't exist, those have been growing quite quickly in terms of popularity in the Kremlin and elsewhere, particularly from 2020, 2021, and right up to the war in 2022. Is Alexander Dugin known to Western officials? Is this man on the radar of the United States or the UK? Yeah, the funny thing about Alexander Dugin is he's probably better known to Western officials than he is known to most Russians. Oh, this is a person who, you know, is very much a self promoter. I can tell you that he has been very popular as an interview subject in the last

10 years, and that he was so popular that he was telling journalists he wanted 500 euro to be interviewed at a certain point after 2014 and 2015. So you get the kind of idea of what kind of person this was. What has Alexander Dugin been saying and doing since Russia invaded Ukraine? Is he taking credit? He has to a certain degree. Yeah, this is a person who says that he kind of foresaw the conflict before it happened. But keep in mind that this is not a person who most people are seeing on Russian television because he was still somewhat a fringe guest, even for the kind of mainstream political pundits that you would see on TV. Would you have seen his daughter, Daria?

You would have seen his daughter, Daria. And I think that's one of the key differences between them. Daria, to a certain degree, managed to take on a lot of the politics that her dad promoted. You know, this kind of Russian exceptionalism, especially from a kind of philosophical point of view. She presented herself as a deep thinker, but one who came to the same conclusions about, you know, the war being correct, about Ukrainians and the West being in a zombie state, were some of the things that she said. Daria was a slicker version, you could say, of her father, less well-known, of course, but somebody who was kind of carrying on the family tradition.

It's something she would say, is that she had the kind of same views as her father and was carrying on that tradition as well. You know, you could compare it to Jean-Marie Le Pen and his daughter in France as the idea of this kind of single political idea, but it's just a different packaging for it. And, you know, right up until her death was having these kinds of appearances on Russian television where she was saying pretty inflammatory stuff. There's a lot of speculation in the news that the target of this car bombing was her father, Alexander Dugin. Who do you think was the target?

My first reaction when I heard about the car bombing was that this must have been meant for him and that it was a mistake. He's an unusual target. You know, if we think that this was done because of the war or in some way tied to the war, there are much more influential people and people who are much more closely involved in the planning for the war. People have fought in Ukraine, but he's somebody that could make sense as a target for revenge or retribution, especially because he's well-known in the West. The daughter also, you know, since she was involved in politics, it was seen, I think, still as a kind of political assassination or some kind of assassination that had hit somebody who supported the war.

But there isn't a real sense of, you know, why she would be targeted instead of him. My first assumption was that Daria Dugan's murder would be a huge slap in the face to Putin. The Kremlin released a condolence letter addressed to Dugin and his wife calling this a vile, cruel crime. It seemed at first like this was the daughter of Putin's ally, a man that he cares deeply about. But you've painted a different picture of the relationship between Putin and Dugin. Is it possible that Vladimir Putin doesn't really care about this murder? I can't speak for Putin because I can't be inside his mind. But I do think that even calling him a kind of close ally would be an exaggeration.

But there is certainly a world where, for Putin, this is just part of the cost of the war that's taking place. There was always an expectation that Russia would have to sacrifice some things in order to achieve this greater aim of subjugating Ukraine, of pushing back you know western influence and after six months this is the kind of first, let's say, political attack, if this is tied to the war that's taking place in Moscow. And I think that to him, it could very much be just the cost of doing business. Coming up, will it increase that cost of doing business on Putin's turf. The murder of Darya Dugina may mean this war has finally come to Russia. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

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where it had gone on fire and kind of crashed into a fence close by and there's some video that was shared or it's a leaked of him kind of standing there holding his head uh looking at you know this car where his daughter had just been driving that had just blown up it's fairly raw you know it happened just right after the moment when the attack took place the images have been shared a lot especially on on the internet you know on social media because tensions are very raw this is a person who was very strongly disliked in Ukraine for the things that he had talked about, you know, violence being necessary. And there wasn't much sympathy for him, I think. And that's kind of driving a reaction in Russia among the elites who knew him as well, who have been very strongly demanding a kind of backlash or response to that. And he came out with a statement that I would say was fairly hard line, pro-war, and kind of exactly what we would expect Dugan to say. This is something that was put out in written form.

But he said that, you know, it wouldn't be enough to demand retribution for her death. What we really need is victory. He means victory in the war over Ukraine, and that he gave up his daughter, essentially, as part of his contribution to the war that's taking place. So very little in terms of changing any kind of political view or any view on what had happened. I mean, this was a very kind of hard line, stay the course statement for a person who just lost his daughter in this attack. Who is Russia saying is responsible for her death? So the Russians have come out and said that they think Ukraine is behind the attack. It's not much of a surprise.

That was kind of where this was all going. They claim that a Ukrainian woman traveled with her, say, 12-year-old daughter in a Mini Cooper across the border into Russia, moved into the apartment where Daria Dugina lived, surveilled her, went to the festival, planted the bomb, you know, and then after the attack that they took the same Mini Cooper, switched the license plates, and drove out of the country and are now hiding in Estonia. So that version is a mouthful and it naturally has a lot of people, you know, asking questions. You know, they have put out video of her, this woman crossing the border, coming into Russia

and then leaving Russia and apparently entering a house that they say is the same one that Dugina lived in. But, you know, it's pretty far from any kind of concrete proof that she was involved in the attack. Ukraine has denied the attack. And in general, Ukraine denies cross-border attacks against Russia and says that, you know, it only speaks about attacks that basically take place in Ukraine and fighting that takes place in Ukraine. But it has been a very strong denial in this case. And everybody who supposedly,

you know, knows this woman or is involved is also so far denied that she has any kind of connection to the attack. So in this case, the FSB, which is the Russian security services, we understand why they're accusing Ukraine of this attack. But it is a little bit difficult to take their accusations at face value. You know, we obviously need more evidence to understand what happened. And it kind of remains unclear. There are a lot of other theories about what could have taken place in the attack. One that the Ukrainians have discussed is the idea that it's what some call a false flag, the idea of a conspiracy where the bomb

was planted in order to, you know, generate a reason to either escalate the war or launch a political crackdown at home, right? So it's the idea that Russia itself, you know, launched the attack. And then there are a bunch of other ideas too about what could have happened. But first of all, it's difficult to really find evidence for any of them. And second of all, some of the other theories probably aren't going to influence what happens going forward. To me, the key is that Russia came out with these accusations, they went public with them. And to a certain degree, that indicates that Russia is going to launch some kind of response to what's happened. In Ukraine tonight, fears of retaliation in a country already on high alert

as Ukraine prepares to mark six months of war on Wednesday, coinciding with its day of independence. President Zelensky warning Russia may be planning something particularly cruel to ruin the occasion. Ukraine's second largest city will impose a round-the-clock curfew on a bittersweet Independence Day. Okay, and then there's reporting that a former member of Russia's parliament, a man who is on the outs with Vladimir Putin, is claiming that a Russian resistance exists

and that resistance has taken responsibility. Can you tell me about that claim and whether you are convinced at all by it? It's a pretty extraordinary claim. It would be an incredible moment and incredibly politically important if there was a kind of armed resistance inside of Russia right now that was physically now taking steps to try to attack the government, stop the war. I think a lot of people were very surprised to see the claims that were being made because there just hasn't been much evidence so far of a kind of real armed resistance inside of Russia. So, you know, in many

ways, all we can do is take the remarks at face value. But it seems like officials in Kiev and officials in Russia both have kind of rejected that claim so far. Do you think this could be a turning point in how the war is fought in any sense? You know, what the Russians who are speaking out most loudly about this attack are saying is that they want to see retribution and that they want to see Russia really start to target government buildings in Kiev, government officials. They want to see targeted killings. And while those have to a certain degree taken place so far, you know, we still see missile attacks against Ukrainian cities. It's clear that it could probably be stepped up and that we could

see something that looks much more like urban fighting, both in Ukrainian cities, but also in Russia as well. This is something that could become a danger for places like Moscow, St. Petersburg, where the Russian elite are. And it would be the first time when for a lot of Russians, the war really starts to come home. In Moscow, one thing that's so surprising here is the fact that you could feel like there's really no war taking place at all. People go on with their daily lives. You see some symbols that are, you know, related to the war, mostly pro-war symbols like big Zs, you know, on public transport. But to be honest, otherwise, you don't really see much of the war at all here. And if there start to be bombings,

shootings, and things like that that i think that it really becomes unavoidable and impossible to ignore one place where we've seen that is crimea where somehow you know people were still going on vacation as though nothing was taking place as though there was no war taking place in ukraine just dozens of miles away and it was only when ammunition dumps started blowing up there and that people started getting a little bit spooked and realizing, oh, wait a minute,

maybe we shouldn't be on vacation here right now. So I think that's a real goal for the Ukrainian side if this was them behind it. And I do think that that's a huge concern for Russia as well. So months into Russia's invasion of Ukraine, this war could now be coming to Russia. Exactly. And not just to Russia, but to ordinary Russians, you know, and to people who live in some of the country's biggest cities. I think that's the fear. And also the whole concern

around the bombing is not just about who it was and this individual family, but also about what it represents. Fear, terror, the Russians would argue. That's what could worry the Kremlin the most. Andrew Roth, he's the Moscow correspondent for The Guardian. Today's show was produced by Avishai Artsy with an assist from Halima Shah on a Sunday, no less. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard with help from Tori Dominguez. It was engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey.

Amina El-Sadi edited the show. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.