Live Updates: Russia Opens Murder Investigation After Blast Kills Daughter of Putin
A car bomb in a Moscow suburb killed the adult daughter of a Russian ultranationalist who helped lay the ideological foundation for President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a brazen attack that injected new uncertainty into the nearly six-month-long war.
The Russian authorities said on Sunday that they had opened a murder investigation into the death a night earlier of Daria Dugina, 29, after the Toyota Land Cruiser she was driving exploded on a highway 20 miles west of Moscow and burst into flames, scattering pieces across the road.
Ms. Dugina was the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin — a self-educated philosopher and long a leading proponent of an aggressive, imperialist Russia who has been urging the Kremlin to escalate its assault on Ukraine.
Russian state television described the powerful explosion that shattered the windows of nearby homes as a “terrorist act” that had targeted Mr. Dugin and ended up killing his daughter because he took a different car at the last minute.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the incident.
A Ukrainian official disavowed his country’s involvement. But pro-Kremlin commentators and politicians quickly blamed Ukraine and demanded revenge. The Kremlin, though, was quiet. Neither Mr. Putin nor his spokesman had issued a statement as night fell in Moscow.
The rare attack on a member of the pro-Kremlin elite — reminiscent of the fiery assassinations of Moscow’s chaotic 1990s — had the potential to further upend Mr. Putin’s efforts to make progress in the war in Ukraine while maintaining a sense of normalcy at home. It came after a spate of Ukrainian attacks deep behind the front line in Crimea, and as many of the war’s most ardent cheerleaders — including the ultranationalists in Mr. Dugin’s circle — have been calling on Mr. Putin to launch a harsh new assault in retaliation.
A senior Ukrainian official said his country was not responsible for the attack.
“Ukraine certainly had nothing to do with yesterday’s explosion,” Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine’s president, said in televised comments on Sunday morning. “We are not a criminal state like the Russian Federation, much less a terrorist one.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria V. Zakharova, wrote on Telegram that if Ukraine had been responsible, “then we have to be talking about a policy of state terrorism being realized by the Kyiv regime.”