Referred to as “Putin’s Rasputin” or “Putin’s brain”, by many in recent months the philosopher and ideologue Alexander Dugin, whose daughter Darya was killed last night in an explosion that some say targeted him, was considered by many to be the de facto author of the Russian president’s strategy in Ukraine. He has never held an official position in the Russian government, and in the past had academic posts and editor-in-chief of Tsargrad TV, a fervent pro-Putin broadcaster, always maintaining the utmost secrecy about his ties with Putin. But it is clear that his language and rhetoric, imbued with far-right sovereignty and occultism, have long been adopted by the Kremlin.
Born in 1962 in the family of a then Soviet intelligence officer, Dugin, who began his career as a journalist for a far-right newspaper Den in which in 1991 he published the manifest “The great war of the continents” in which he presented the vision of a Russia as “an eternal Rome” fighting against the individualistic and materialistic West “eternal Carthage” – is considered the founder of the Euranism movement with the aim of creating a Eurasian superpower through the integration of the former Soviet republics in a Eurasian union.
Daughter Dugina, born in 1992, had a degree in philosophy from Moscow State University. She wrote for Tsargard and Rt, pro-Kremlin newspapers, under the pseudonym of Darya Platonova. You were one of the authors of the forthcoming “book of Z” on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On 4 July she was placed on the UK sanction list.