Dugina, daughter of ultra-nationalist Alexander Dugin, was killed on Saturday in a car bomb attack outside the capital. Moscow blamed Ukrainian intelligence services for masterminding her assassination, a claim Kyiv denied. Her father, 60-year-old Dugin, who for decades pushed for the creation of a new Russian state that would annex the territory of countries including Ukraine, told mourners that his daughter “died for the people, died for Russia.” “The huge price we have to pay can only be justified by our highest achievement, our victory,” said a visibly emotional Dugin. “He lived for the sake of victory and died for the sake of victory. Our Russian victory, our truth, our Orthodox faith, our state.” A large black-and-white portrait of Dugina, 30, who was said to be close to her father and worked as a nationalist media commentator, hung on a wall behind her coffin. Dugina’s death on Saturday night followed calls from Moscow’s political elite for new raids on Ukraine and led to fears in Kyiv of new attacks to coincide with Ukraine’s independence day on Wednesday. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Monday that a Ukrainian woman who arrived in Russia in late July with her 12-year-old daughter was behind Dugina’s murder. The FSB said that after the murder, the woman and her daughter fled across the border to Estonia. Ukraine has repeatedly denied Kiev’s involvement in the bomb blast, and Estonia dismissed the Russian claim as a “provocation”. The funeral ceremony, held in a hall in Moscow’s television center on Tuesday, was attended by many powerful pro-Kremlin businessmen and senior Russian politicians. Parliamentary leaders of the three main pro-Kremlin parties spoke at the service, praising Dugina as a patriot and vowing to pursue those who had ordered her murder. Archie Bland and Nimo Omer take you to the top stories and what they mean, free every weekday morning Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Konstantin Malofeev, a wealthy pro-Kremlin conservative businessman close to the Dugin family, called Dugina a martyr whose death would make Russia “stronger” in its fight against Ukraine. “The people who are fighting against us do not understand that the Russian people are not only made up of those who are alive now, but are made up of those who lived before us and will live after. And we will become stronger with the blood of our martyrs. “And thanks to the untimely end of our beloved Dasha [Darya] we will definitely be victorious in this war,” he said. In a particularly dark speech, Leonid Slutsky, the leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, called on Russians to unite, saying: “Regardless of our political parties, faith and age, there can only be one approach: one country, one President, one victory”. Slutsky’s words immediately drew comparisons on Russian social media to the infamous Nazi-era slogan: “One people, one empire and one leader.” Also present was Yevgeny Prigozhin, a businessman with close ties to Vladimir Putin who is under Western sanctions for his ties to the private military group Wagner. “Dasa was the cornerstone of Russian greatness and Russian power. And the fact that they tried to hit this stone only made the foundation stronger,” Prigozhin told reporters outside the funeral. Russian state television, which broadcast wide coverage of the funeral, also praised Dugina as a martyr. “I think Dasha Dugina is our Joan of Arc,” political commentator Alexei Mukhin told Channel 1. On Monday, Putin posthumously awarded Dugina the Medal of Courage, writing in a letter of condolence that she had a “true Russian heart: kind, loving, sympathetic and open.”
