Dugina car bombing part of SBU’s shadow war against Russia, Washington Post reports
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Ukrainian SBU security service agents installed a hidden compartment in a pet carrier and used it to hide components of the bomb that killed Daria Dugina, the daughter of a Russian nationalist, U.S. newspaper the Washington Post reported on Oct. 23, citing security officials with knowledge of the operation.
The cluttered car carrying a mother and her 12-year-old daughter seemed barely worth the attention of Russian security officials as it approached a border checkpoint. But the least conspicuous piece of luggage — a crate for a cat — was part of an elaborate, lethal plot, the newspaper wrote.
Four weeks later, the device detonated just outside Moscow in an SUV being driven by Dugina. The operation was orchestrated and executed by the SBU on Aug, 20, the officials said, providing details that have not been previously disclosed, including the use of the pet carrier.
The operation is part of a raging shadow war in which Ukraine’s spy services have also twice bombed the bridge connecting Russia to occupied Crimea, piloted drones into the roof of the Kremlin, and blown holes in the hulls of Russian naval vessels in the Black Sea, the Washington Post said.
These operations have been cast as extreme measures Ukraine was forced to adopt in response to Russia’s invasion last year. In reality, they represent capabilities that Ukraine’s spy agencies have developed over nearly a decade — since Russia first seized Ukrainian territory in 2014 — a period during which the services also forged deep new bonds with the CIA.
The missions have involved elite teams of Ukrainian agents drawn from directorates that were formed, trained and equipped in close partnership with the CIA, according to current and former Ukrainian and U.S. officials.
The extent of the CIA’s involvement with Ukraine’s security services has not previously been disclosed. U.S. intelligence officials stressed that the agency has had no involvement in targeted killing operations by Ukrainian agencies, and that its work has focused on bolstering those services’ abilities to gather intelligence on a dangerous adversary.
At least a dozen Russian operatives, high-ranking separatist commanders or collaborators, officers behind the front lines, and known supporters of the war in the Russian rear, including propagandist Vladlen Tatarsky, have been killed by the SBU and Ukraine’s Main Intelligence Directorate (HUR) over the past 20 months, the newspaper report claimed.
The car bombing that killed Dugina last year continues to stand out as one of the more extreme cases of lethal revenge. Like her father, she was an active propagandist, a vocal supporter of the invasion, justifying Russia's war against Ukraine and advocating genocide against the Ukrainian people. Kremlin propagandists blamed the Ukrainian political leadership for her murder.
Russian authorities had barely finished clearing the debris when on Aug. 22 the FSB identified Natalia Vovk (allegedly the Ukrainian Azov Battalion's member) and her pre-teenage daughter Sofia Shaban as prime suspects.
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has denied Ukrainian involvement in Dugina's murder.
The Ukrainian National Guard said that Natalia Vovk had never served in Azov, and that Russian propagandists were using this fabrication to justify the decision to recognize the National Guard unit as a "terrorist organization".
Azov also said the Russian claims were a fabrication.
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