In honor of the assassinated Darya Dugina, President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree posthumously awarding her the Order of Courage. In statements yesterday, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called her murder a “barbaric crime for which no forgiveness can be granted,” expressing the hope that the investigation into the murder will identify all the culprits. “Certainly, the organizers, the middlemen and the executors can get no mercy,” he said. (https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1827222/ )
The Russians publicly blame Ukraine’s special services for the murder, as UN Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia stated again yesterday in his testimony before the emergency meeting of the UN Security Council called to discuss the situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. He reported that Russia’s “competent authorities” have identified the “perpetrator affiliated with the nationalist battalion `Azov’” and held up a picture of Dugina “from the infamous Peacemaker website” (Myrotvorets) which, he said, “openly flaunt her murder—as you can see, Darya’s photo is crossed out with the inscription `liquidated.’” (https://russiaun.ru/en/news/230822n )
Nebenzia called on the UNSC and its leadership to strongly condemn “this latest crime of the Kiev regime. Not only are they actively using nuclear blackmail, shelling the Zaporozhye [Zaporizhzhia] nuclear power plant … but they also crossed all the lines by physically eliminating foreign civilians they do not like.” Nebenzia expressed “outrage that not only the Western countries do not condemn all this, but also help the Ukrainian special services to train subversive saboteurs to exterminate `undesirables.’” He pointed to recent remarks by Ukraine’s Ambassador to Kazakhstan Pytor Vrublevsky, who publicly said that Ukraine’s goal is to kill as many Russians as possible, and that the more killed now means that fewer will have to be killed by the next generations of Ukrainians.
