By Annabelle Timsit and Rachel Pannett
Daria, (click here) daughter of Alexander Dugin, allegedly the brainchild of Russian President Vladimir Putin, has been killed in an attack.
...Dugin, a scathing critic of the United States (click here) who has been on its sanctions list since 2015, has often been credited with influencing the Kremlin’s thinking on Russian expansion and Ukraine, although his links to Putin have been sometimes overstated and the extent of their direct relationship is unclear. Dugin doesn’t hold an official government position.
Dugin, who has theorized about a perpetual war between Russia and the West for decades, has long called for the reabsorption of Ukraine into Russia. Experts say his language and expansionist views of Russia’s place in the world have been echoed by the Kremlin and in recent speeches by Putin. He was active in breakaway regions in the 2008 Russia-Georgia war and in 2014 in Ukraine, where U.S. officials say he recruited individuals with military and combat experience to fight on behalf of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic. The separatist enclave in eastern Ukraine has played a central role in Putin’s justification of the war.
Dugin also controls Geopolitica, “a website that serves as a platform for Russian ultra-nationalists to spread disinformation and propaganda targeting Western and other audiences,” according to U.S. Treasury officials. The website has accused the United States and NATO of provoking war with Russia to “further terrorize the American people in all sorts of malicious ways.”...
...Dugin, a scathing critic of the United States (click here) who has been on its sanctions list since 2015, has often been credited with influencing the Kremlin’s thinking on Russian expansion and Ukraine, although his links to Putin have been sometimes overstated and the extent of their direct relationship is unclear. Dugin doesn’t hold an official government position.
There are reports that Ilya Vladimirovich Ponomarev a Russian politician, former member of the Duma and a technology entrepreneur states, "This action (the assassination of Dugina), like many other direct partisan actions carried out on the territory of Russia in recent months, was carried out by the National Republican Army (NRA)..."
Ponomarev as a member of the Russian Duma voted against the annexation of Crimea and the invasion into Ukraine. He was expelled from the Duma for anti-Kremlin activities. The NRA is an underground partisan group working for a violent overthrow of the Putin regime.
It is a civil war in Russia. Vladimir Putin has no insight to his own country's instability should the tables turn. There are Russians that want a different country, a different governance (ie: Navalny - click here) and the war into Ukraine has now opened up the internal weaknesses of Russia. They were underground, they are now surfacing in ways Putin could never imagine.
The Russian people, many the up and coming generations, are against communism and their president. It is an instability that can't be oppressed forever. This is the beginning of an overthrow of the communist regime in Russia. These Russians have stood by and watched the Post-Soviet states become strong and resilient to Russia's fantasy of reconstituting the USSR. They are stronger today knowing their values are the right values for them and Russia.
There will be peace. I am more confident of it today, than before. China will follow.
It is reported that tourists into Crimea are exposing Russian assets in photos posted to social media. The postings by more than one Russian tourist was used as intelligence. The Russian people know little about the Ukraine invasion, so to see Russian military assets in Crimea is like visiting a military base and taking pictures with the country's might. Citizen journalists. That is amazing. Congratulation to Ukraine's intelligence agents.
By Barney Davis
A holiday picture (click here) taken by a Russian tourist visiting a beach in occupied Crimea may have inadvertently given the location of Putin’s air defences away to Ukrainian forces, the Ukrainian Defence Ministry has claimed.
The swimsuit-clad tourist poses in front of “active” S-400 air defence systems positioned around the Yevpatoria Salt Lake next to the Black Sea coast.
The Defence of Ukraine tweeted: “Maybe we are being too hard on russian tourists… Sometimes they can be really helpful.
“Like this man taking pictures at russian air defence positions near Yevpatoria, in occupied Crimea. Thank you and keep up the good work!”
