RUSSIAN spies tried to kill Vladimir Putin’s guru in a Mafia-style hit as they feared he was becoming too powerful, a leading expert and enemy of the Kremlin has said.
Yuri Felshtinsky said the car bomb attack on Alexander Dugin, which killed his daughter, would have been backed by the Russian tyrant and was likely carried out by his GRU military intelligence forces.
He said the attack has the hallmarks of the GRU, which has a habit of targeting its enemies’ children as it did when it tried to kill Russian defector Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK in 2018.
Neo-Nazi mystic Dugin, who has been described as "Putin's brain", reportedly suffered a heart attack following the blast that wiped out his 30-year-old daughter Darya Dugina.
Felshtinsky believes the attack was instigated by the GRU who believed Dugin was getting too powerful and was too extreme, even for Russia.
The hit would have been “authorised by the Kremlin” with a nod from Putin himself.
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“We have to understand that when permission is given then it’s silent permission,” Felshtinsky told The Sun Online.
“He would say ‘I feel uncomfortable about what this person has said, I think we better discuss how to eliminate his influence’.
“It’s not like he would say ‘kill him’. This is not how it’s done.”
Dugin has been seen in public for the first time since the attack, at his daughter's funeral and has called for vengeance for her death.
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Felshtinsky is a widely respected Russian-American writer and historian and the author of Blowing up Ukraine: The Return of Russian Terror and the Threat of World War III.
He said that the GRU has “major ideological disagreements” with Dugin who is “too extreme even for Russia”.
“He pretends that he’s the leader, he believes in his own importance," he said.
“Maybe he was aiming for a higher position that some people didn’t want him to get. Dugin is a very controversial person with many enemies.
“Some people could see him as a rival who was aiming for a higher position.”
Dugin narrowly dodged a car bomb blast that killed his daughter after reportedly switching cars at the last minute.
Felshtinsky explained that the Russian espionage tradition is for a hit to be carried out by an organisation with links to the victim.
The GRU tried to kill Dugin because his father was a former military intelligence and was seen as “one of their own”.
All this adds up to Mafia-style car bomb attack to take out a powerful rival.
“Yes, the way that power is built in Russia now is very similar to the Mafia,” he said.
Who is Alexander Dugin?
RUSSIA’S invasion of Ukraine may have been inspired by the deranged writings of the man known as “Putin’s brain”.
Dugin has long called for an invasion of Ukraine and chillingly believes that Moscow has the right to rule over all of Europe and Asia.
Dubbed a philosopher, a mystic, a political analyst and a fascist, Dugin is thought by some to hold a key influence on Putin's Russia and his views are believed to have – at least in part – been a key influence in the thinking for the invasion.
His writings – which have been required reading for Russian soldiers – proclaim a paranoid worldview that calls for Ukraine to be absorbed into Russia.
In the 1990s, as Putin was rising through the ranks of Russia's political elite, Dugin was a deeply influential figure in shaping Russian geopolitics.
Born in Moscow in 1962, Dugin began writing in the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union was falling apart.
He is most famous for his 1997 book Foundations of Geopolitics, which sets out his ultranationalist and neo-fascist ideology of Neo-Eurasianism.
This belief states that the world is made up of "land powers" and "sea powers", and that as the great land nation, Russia should exert its influence over all of Europe and Asia.
And his mysticism comes from his beliefs in divine right and his touting of ancient legends about the sunken city of Atlantis and the mythical civilisation Hyperborea.
He believes Russia is the modern-day reincarnation of the ancient "Hyperboreans" – who need to stand at odds with the modern-day "Atlanteans", the United States.
“In Russia it’s former state security people who run the country and they are run very closely like a Mafia style organisation.”
Dugin’s influence on Russian politics, as well as his huge beard and piercing eyes, have also seen him compared to notorious Rasputin.
The advisor to the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, and alleged lover to his wife, was killed by Russian aristocrats and army officers who feared his influence was leading the country to disaster.
Felshtinsky believes GRU officers were similarly motivated in their desire to kill Dugin.
“Dugin is a kind of Rasputin. The way he was killed is a good comparison to the current circumstances.”
Russia has bizarrely placed the blame on a female Ukrainian assassin who it claims snuck into Moscow with her 12-year-old daughter.
According to Felshtinsky, there is “no chance” the Ukrainians would have carried out the attempted assassination and also dismissed the idea that this is an internal Russian opposition dissident group.
But the hit does have the fingerprints of the GRU because it has record of going after its enemies’ children in the manner of the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.
“When someone in the government decided it’s time to take him down, then it’s going to be the GRU,” he said.
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“It’s the same as Skripal – he was from the GRU and the two people sent to kill him were from the GRU.
“To kill a father with their child is also a GRU tradition, like in the Skripal case.”
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