Videos of the explosion showed a vehicle on fire at the side of the road and smashed car parts strewn across the surrounding area. One unverified video appears to show Dugin at the scene.

A friend of Dugina told TASS that he believed Dugina’s father was the true target of the blast — or possibly both of them — as the car belonged to Alexander.

“It’s her father’s car,” Krasnov told TASS. “Dasha (Darya) drives another car, but she drove his car today, and Alexander went separately,” Andrei Krasnov, head of the Russky Gorizont (Russian Horizon) social movement and a personal acquaintance of Dugina’s family, told TASS.

A Russian foreign ministry official implied that Ukrainian state structures were responsible for the explosion, a claim that Ukrainian authorities have denied.

“If the Ukrainian trace is confirmed… then we should talk about the policy of state terrorism implemented by the Kyiv regime,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a Telegram post. “There have been plenty of facts accumulated over the years: from political calls for violence to the leadership and participation of Ukrainian state structures in crimes,” she said.

Ukraine on Sunday strenuously denied any involvement in the car explosion. “Ukraine definitely has nothing to do with this because we are not a criminal state, which the Russian Federation is, and even more so, we are not a terrorist state,” Mykhailo Podoliak, adviser to the Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said in a Ukrainian TV interview.

‘Flames completely engulfed it’

When Dugina “turned onto the Mozhaiskoye highway near the village of Bolshiye Vyazemi, there was an explosion, the car caught fire immediately,” Krasnov told TASS.

“The flames completely engulfed it. She lost control because she was driving at high speed and flew to the opposite side of the road,” Krasnov added, as cited by TASS.

In the meantime, forensic experts, investigators and experts in explosive engineering are inspecting the scene.

Dugina, the daughter, was born in 1992 and studied Philosophy at Moscow State University, according to TASS.

In March 2022, the US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned Dugina for her contribution to an article on the United World International (UWI) website suggesting that Ukraine would “perish” if it is admitted to NATO. Dugina was UWI’s chief editor.

She claimed in a recent interview with the Russian news channel, 1RNK, that the atrocities that happened during the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian town of Bucha were American propaganda, chosen because of its phonological similarity to “butcher,” a word she connects with US President Joe Biden calling Putin a “butcher” on March 29.

Her father was also sanctioned by the United States in 2015 for being responsible for, or complicit in actions or policies that threaten peace, security, stability, or sovereignty or territorial integrity of Ukraine.

In an interview with CNN in 2017, Dugin remarked on many similarities between his ideas and those of former US president Donald Trump. He called Trump’s inauguration speech discourse “as if I would write it myself.”

He also said that Putin provided inspiration for Trump, “a kind of… example to challenge the status quo, to challenge the conventional wisdom, challenge all this totalitarian principles of globalists and ultra-liberals.”