Russia has blamed Ukrainian special services for the murder of Darya Dugina, a Russian political commentator and the daughter of prominent ultranationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin, according to Russian state news agency TASS.
“The murder of journalist Darya Dugina has been solved, it was prepared by the Ukrainian special services, by a citizen of Ukraine,” TASS reported, citing Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), which named a woman as the perpetrator and said she had fled to Estonia after the attack.
Ukraine has denied any involvement in Dugina’s killing, calling the FSB claims fiction.
“We have nothing to do with the murder of this lady — this is the work of the Russian special services,” said Oleksii Danylov, secretary of Ukraine’s National Security Council, in an interview on Ukrainian television Monday.
“I emphasize once again that our special services have nothing to do with this,” he said.
Dugina, the editor of a Russian disinformation website, died after a bomb planted in a car she was driving went off in the outskirts of Moscow on Saturday evening.
The FSB said the assailant was a Ukrainian woman who arrived in Russia on July 23 with her young daughter, TASS reported. The pair attended a festival on Saturday near Moscow where Dugina was a guest of honor.
“The criminals used a Mini Cooper car to monitor the journalist,” TASS reported, citing the FSB, adding that the woman had rented an apartment in Moscow in the same building where Dugina lived.
After remotely detonating explosives planted in Dugina’s Toyota Land Cruiser Prado, the FSB said the woman and her daughter drove through the Pskov region to Estonia, roughly a 12-hour journey.
CNN cannot independently verify the FSB claims cited by the TASS report.
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