On August 20, 2022, a car bomb killed Russian far-right political commentator Darya Dugina
on this street in the suburbs of Moscow.
Obviously, assassinations are not good for the stability of your country.
And while we don’t yet know who is responsible for the attack—or whether the actual intended
target was
her father Alexander Dugin, who is also a far-right political commentator and just happened
to switched cars at the last minute—
the situation is likely even worse for Moscow than it seems.
With that in mind, let’s discuss the four most likely explanations for the attack
and what it means for the broader war in Ukraine.
#1 False Flag Operation
Let’s start with the tin foil hat theory.
This appears to be an unlikely option, but it may also be the most interesting.
Under this explanation, Russian intelligence orchestrated the hit to rally support for
the war.
Both Alexander and Darya were hardliners that believed Russia had been too soft in Ukraine.
They advocated for a broader imperial Russia, stretching all the way from Central Europe
to the Pacific Ocean.
However, neither was personally close to Putin.
That made them the “right” target for such an operation.
World powers have been involved in false flag operations like this before.
The most famous instance is
the Mukden Incident, in which Japanese officers faked a Chinese bombing of a rail line to
create a pretext to invade Manchuria.
The best part of false flag operations is that it is always easy to find your own “proof”
of the origin of the attack,
because you are making it all up anyway.
If this is a Russian false flag, it signals two underlying problems that Moscow faces.
First, it indicates that Russia’s military intelligence officials estimate that the current
status quo in Ukraine is untenable
and that eventually Ukraine will push the expected outcome of the war back eastward.
Kyiv has stalled Russia’s advances, and HIMARS strikes have perhaps softened up Russia
for a counterattack.
Maybe Moscow realizes the only way to stop Ukraine from retaking some or all of its lost
land is to raise a larger army.
Failing to do so could be backbreaking for
Putin’s regime.
Finishing a costly war without securing any tangible benefits is an invitation for political
competitors to overthrow him.
It also hints at a second Russian weakness:
Putin cannot mobilize those troops under the current political conditions.
It has become a joke in the West, but Russia still classifies the invasion as a
“special military operation.”
Legally, Putin cannot shift to a widespread military mobilization without declaring a
war.
A false flag attack would indicate that Putin does not believe such an act would be politically
popular under current conditions and therefore needs something to move public sentiment.
Pointing the finger at someone else is the solution.
We may be observing the first step of this: five days after the attack, Putin ordered
an increase of about 137,000 troops beginning in January 2023.
#2 Ukrainian Attack
Straight from the FSB, this is the official explanation Russia has given.
A Ukrainian operative originally from the Azov Regiment—
the East Ukrainian military group originally from Mariupol that is the basis for Putin’s
nebulous argument that the invasion is intended to “de-Nazify” Ukraine—
entered Russia on July 23 along with her daughter.
She then moved into the same Moscow apartment complex as Dugina’s,
and spent the next month meticulously planning the attack.
Upon its completion, she drove to Estonia and is now somewhere in the European Union.
This explanation raises more questions than it answers.
There is a consensus that Ukraine has been hitting targets across its borders into Russia.
This includes the Millerovo airbase at the start of the war.
Ukraine has also hit Russian-annexed Crimea, including the Saky airbase.
But those places have been close to the theatre of operations with an obvious military application.
Moscow is much, much more distant, and Dugina was a civilian.
Combined with the vector of attack, this should concern Putin.
Imagine that Ukraine indeed has the ability to project unconventional power that far and
has plans to continue doing it.
Then Russia will have to invest heavily in domestic countermeasures.
But then the “special military operation” will start feeling like a much broader conflict.
Moreover, unlike a false flag operation, Putin would not be in control of the targets.
The potential for domestic discontent could grow and threaten his regime.
Nevertheless, Dugina would be a strange target for the Ukrainian government to go after.
She was a journalist and television celebrity, so this should not strike fear into the average
Russian citizen.
And she did not work for the government, so the attack did not directly target any pertinent
decision makers.
If Ukraine had the ability to extend so far into Russia, there seem to be better political
or military targets—
things that might actually make progress toward ending the war, rather than just occupy news
headlines for a week.
Russia also has a strong incentive to lie about the origins of the attack.
This is especially true if it was a false flag operation, but is also the case for any
other origin.
The attack may just be a politically convenient way to drum up Russian support for the war—or
special military operation.
And all of the evidence to go along with it has been conveniently fabricated to fit the
narrative.
Beyond that, Russia has another incentive to lie that connects to the third explanation.
This is #3 an attack by Russian resistance
Russia has made substantial territorial gains during the war, and now controls about 20%
of Ukraine’s land.
For perspective, that would be as if the United States lost California, Oregon, Washington,
Nevada, Idaho, Arizona, and Montana.
But the initial push toward Kyiv was a disaster.
And six months into the war, Russian casualties likely far exceed
what the Soviet Union experienced in the entirety of the Afghanistan War from the 1980s.
Putin has held onto power and maintained relative popularity because disproportionately few
of these casualties are coming from Moscow or Saint Petersburg—the power centers of
Russian politics.
It is reasonable to think that partisan groups may be forming and hiding in plain sight within
Russia, aiming to create domestic instability and overthrow Putin’s regime.
Ilya Ponomarev, the only member of Russia’s parliament to vote against the annexation
of Crimea in 2014 and who now lives in exile in Ukraine, made the claim that the attack
was the
work of the “National Republican Army”, an up-until-then unheard-of militant group.
There is very little to corroborate that claim, but it is consistent with how militant groups
operate.
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It may seem strange that an organization would want to reveal its identity.
Finding them then becomes easier, and so Russian security forces are more likely to strike
back.
However, both the violence and credit claiming are standard behaviors due to an incentive
political scientists call “outbidding”.
To survive, such organizations need funding and manpower from a more general audience.
They use attacks as a bizarre form of advertisement to achieve those ends.
Credit claiming is a natural extension to that.
This would also help make sense of the target: a celebrity keeps the story in the news for
longer and keeps the group’s name circulating
while still not drawing the full wrath of the Russian government that might arise if
the target had been a political power player.
The deeper concern for Putin here is that an attack by such a group signals larger underlying
resentment for his regime than we would expect otherwise.
A group would not accept the risks that come along with an assassination plot if they did
not think there would be large-scale rewards for doing so.
That means the group anticipates that there is a large pool of potential supporters that
will come to them with both money and to volunteer their services.
It is also consistent with Russia’s claim that the attack came from Ukraine.
As we have discussed before, the strength of an autocratic ruler depends on citizens
expecting other citizens not to resist.
That’s because any individual citizen would not want to go out and protest if they knew
no one else was.
Doing so is a one-way ticket to jail.
But there is safety in numbers, and individuals might not want to miss out on the revolutionary
party.
Gotta get those pics for the socials after all.
Acknowledging that the attack came from within signals that there is growing anti-regime
support.
That can create a self-fulfilling prophecy of anti-regime protests, and that is something
that Putin wants to avoid at all costs.
This takes us to the final possibility: #4 a Random Act of Violence
Of all the options, this one is the least interesting from a strategic perspective.
It could be that this was an act without a deeper meaning, or perhaps a personal vendetta
unconnected to the current war.
Car bombings were somewhat commonplace in Boris Yeltsin’s Russia during the 1990s.
Ironically, one of the reasons for Putin’s popularity within the country is because there
has been relative domestic peace during the Putin era.
It still looks bad that Russian police forces did not stop the attack,
but this kind of thing happens in countries that are not otherwise embroiled in war at
all.
And those are four interpretations of what happened.
Which do you think is most likely?
Let me know in the comments.
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