The scoop of the “New York Times”: Washington did not know, Kiev leaders warned
The American secret services suspect it was the Ukrainians who assassinated Darya Dugina
, last August 20 in Moscow. In any case the Biden administration was not forewarned. If he had known, he would have tried to persuade the Kiev government to give up the action. The New York Times reconstructs one of the darkest events of recent months, even if information is still lacking to complete the picture. The newspaper writes that immediately after the attack “sectors of the US government expressed their irritation at the adventurism of covert operations”. It is unclear whether Joe Biden’s advisers moved or whether the CIA protested. That blitz risked fueling escalation in a delicate phase of the war. And then it could have provided Vladimir Putin with the pretext to order the elimination of leading figures in Ukrainestarting with President Volodymyr Zelensky himself.
The US intelligence has not yet identified who authorized the mission in Moscow: the military, counterintelligence, Zelensky himself? Darya Dugina, 29, blew up as soon as she got into the car. She was the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, 60, the most prominent figure on the nationalist right, nicknamed the “Rasputin by Vladimir Putin”, a theorist of the return to “Greater Russia” and therefore an advocate of total war against Ukraine. In Washington, on the other hand, it was immediately assumed that the real target of the attack was Dugindespite the fact that the United States and the EU had sanctioned their daughter Darya for spreading false news on the web.
Even the Russians had blamed the blitz on agents from Kiev. The day after the murder, the FSB, the internal secret service, made it known that it had identified a Ukrainian woman who had rented an apartment in the same condominium as Dugina in July and who had left Russia immediately after the explosion.
From Kiev, Mykhailo Podolyak, one of Zelensky’s closest advisers, has rejected all charges, declaring to the New York Times: «I emphasize it once again: any assassination in wartime in our country or in another must have a concrete justification. It must fulfill a specific purpose, tactical or strategic. A person like Dugina was neither a tactical nor a strategic objective for Ukraine ».
No reaction, for now, in Washington. On Saturday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken phoned his counterpart in Kiev, Dmytro Kuleba, assuring that the US «will continue to support Ukraine’s efforts to regain control of its territories and to strengthen its military and diplomatic strength ”.
The “Dugina case”, however, brings to the fore a problem that worries the Americans. Already at other times the Ukrainians have made secret raids into Russian territory, or within its own borders, hitting the generals of the Putinian army between May and June. Since then thethe White House and the Pentagon asked Zelensky to share operational plansconsidering that the Ukrainian resistance and now the counter-offensive would not even have been imaginable without the weapons and information passed on by the Americans.
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October 5, 2022 (change October 5, 2022 | 22:35)
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