A Murder in Russia and A Swirl of Kremlin Lies

It has been almost six months since Russia invaded Ukraine in violation of international law and the Russian attrocities continue with civilians constantly targeted - again inviloation of international law and the rules of war.  Vladimir Putin, Russia's paranoid dictator who sees himself as Russia's new Tsar appears motivated by delusions of granduer and consistently bad advice by boot licking advisers.  Challenging the war within Russia leaves one with no option but to flee the country as has been done by a former Russian paratrooper who has let loose about Russia's aggression and attrocities to CNN and elsewhere:

The Kremlin's justification for invading Ukraine "is a lie," a Russian paratrooper who previously publicly condemned his country's war in Ukraine has told CNN.

Two weeks ago, Pavel Filatyev spoke out against the conflict in a 141-page-long testimony posted to his VKontakte social media page, then fled Russia. He is the first serving member of the Russian military to publicly criticize the invasion of Ukraine and leave the country.

Now he tells CNN that his fellow troops as tired, hungry and disillusioned -- and that the Kremlin's war effort is "destroying peaceful lives."

"We understood that we were dragged into a serious conflict where we are simply destroying towns and not actually liberating anyone," Filatyev told CNN's Matthew Chance.

Meanwhile, in Russia the daughter of an ultra-nationalist ideologue who applauded the Russian invasion has been killed in a car bombing thought to have targeted her father.  Naturally, Putin blames Ukraine for the bombing - likely for propaganda purposes given the growing difficulty in hiding Russian military deaths and casualties.  Some even suspect that Russia's secret police may have been responsible.  Indeed, with a paranoid dictator in charge anything is possible.  The only guaranteed reality is that (i) lies will continue to flow from the Kremlin and that (ii) nothing Putin and his minions say can be believed.  Pieces in The Atlantic and Washington Post look at the car bombing and the endless lies.  This from The Atlantic:

A car bomb exploded in one of Moscow’s wealthy neighborhoods on Saturday night, killing Darya Dugina, the daughter of Aleksandr Dugin, the spiritual godfather of Russia’s surging fascism. Her death may have an impact far beyond the Russian capital. Or it might not; this may have been part of yet another tangled vendetta among Russia’s elites. We won’t know the truth for a while—if ever—but following this story requires some context about the Dugins.

It’s possible (if unlikely) that this might not have been about politics. Dugin’s daughter was driving her father’s car, but in Moscow, people with money and proximity to power live with a certain amount of generic risk from any number of potential enemies. To be involved in anything of material or political importance in Russia is to court risk.

But the Dugins are not ordinary propagandists. Aleksandr Dugin is part of a weird strain of Russian imperial hypernationalism that somehow manages to venerate Russian Orthodoxy, Stalin, the Nazis, and the occult all at the same time. You can read more here about the late-1980s trends in the U.S.S.R. that produced this vicious and deeply weird school of thought . . . . Much of it is warmed-over Russian messianism and mystical gobbledygook, the product not only of 19th-century Russian grievances against Europe and Western Christianity but also of late-20th-century Soviet resentments against the “Atlantic” world led by the United States.

Underneath it all is the simple and brutal belief that Russia—specifically white, Christian Russia—is destined to rule Eurasia as the first step to contesting world domination with the decadent Americans and Europeans. Dugin’s ravings are as unreadable in Russian as they are in English, but the Russian General Staff assigns Dugin’s book as a required text, and understandably so. It is an almost perfectly Orwellian view of total and permanent war, a perfect ideology for a country afflicted by both a deep inferiority complex and a dark spiritual vacuum.

Ukraine, of course, is at the top of the list of regions to be recaptured. Kyiv is the birthplace of Slavic Christianity, and for people like Dugin (and Vladimir Putin), the existence of Ukraine as an independent state is intolerable. Dugin doesn’t mince words about Ukraine; back in 2014, he said that Ukrainians “must be killed, killed, killed.”

Dugin’s 29-year-old daughter ran a disinformation website in Russia and was already under U.S. sanctions. . . . . She shared her father’s ideology and his loathing for Ukraine.

So who killed her? Russia’s Federal Security Service (the FSB, by its Russian initialism) claims that a Ukranian woman named Natalia Vovk moved into Dugina’s apartment block a month ago, planted the bomb, and fled to Estonia. This seems pretty quick and convenient, and the Russian news service TASS has already declared the case solved.

It’s true that Russian officials in Ukraine have been killed by car bombs, which are old-school hits by modern Russian standards. It’s not clear, however, why the Ukrainians would want to go to Moscow to take out second-stringers like Dugin or his daughter; his star has dimmed over the years, in part because he was critical of Putin for not being brutal and imperialistic enough. . . . . Dugin isn’t a nobody, but he wasn’t exactly running the war in Ukraine, either.

Kyiv denies Moscow’s charges. Meanwhile, a former Russian parliamentarian and dedicated Putin opponent, Ilya Ponomarev, claimed in a broadcast from Kyiv that the bombing was the work of a group calling itself “the National Republican Army” that is dedicated to overthrowing Putin, but this is not verifiable.

Could the FSB have hit Dugina while trying to kill Dugin, perhaps as a plot—the kind Russian spies have been accused of in the past—to spin up fresh hatred against Ukraine and get some of the heat off itself for its botched advice six months ago?

Unless someone with more credibility claims responsibility, or more evidence emerges in Russia, we’re unlikely to know much more anytime soon, no matter how quickly TASS or Twitter declares the case closed. The one certain outcome is that the Russians will use Dugina’s death to press on with their campaign of atrocities and destruction.

The Post piece sums up the situation this way:

And that brings us to the most important point — that we shouldn’t take Kremlin statements at face value. Russia is a paranoid dictatorship prosecuting one of the most brazen acts of international aggression in decades. . . . . six months after the start of the invasion, it remains a crime to state the truth that Russia is waging “war” in Ukraine. Dictatorships, by their nature, do not deal in truths. Any information released by the Russian authorities should be treated less as a description of reality than as a political tool.

Putin - like his asset, Donald Trump - simply never deals in the truth.