Darya Dugina and Possible Scenarios for Russia's War in Ukraine

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On 19 March this year, I published a paper in the Instituto Symposium's online scientific journal in which I discussed, among other things, Russian logistics and other aspects to be taken into account in the evolution of the conflict. I stated that at a certain point it would be necessary to decree the mobilisation of the population. On 19 March this year, I suggested this possibility:

With regard to what we are developing in these lines, and the necessary mobilisation of Russian society, the rise of Vladimir Putin in the Russian presidential elections of 2000 is worth noting. In September 1999, a series of explosions occurred in apartment buildings in Buynaksk (Republic of Dagestan), Moscow and Volgodonsk (Rostov Oblast), and a similar explosive was found and defused on 23 September 1999, only for FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev to explain the next day that the latter case was a real training exercise, which we will not go into here, But it certainly created the conditions for the general mobilisation that could not take place in the First Chechen War and, in turn, gave Vladimir Putin enough popularity to win his first presidential election on 26 March 2000 after Boris Yeltsin's resignation on 31 December 1999, a cycle that draws several parallels.

In the early hours of Saturday morning I was following with interest the events coming out of Russia, until I posted the following link on the Instituto Symposium's Twitter account feed at 3.50am:

At 11:27 a.m. on 21 August, I left my personal commentary on my social networks, and here is an extract from it:

I have waited until early this morning for confirmation of the death of Darya Douguina in an explosion in Aleksandr Dugin's personal vehicle, I have seen images about which I harbour certain doubts, and there are elements that arouse my misgivings of various kinds, which go beyond material authorship (I'm not even talking about intellectual authorship any more)... Dugin has been making statements for years now, obviously in tune with his financial backers, especially after leaving the Kremlin's most important area of coverage at a given moment, although he has always moved in the inner circles of Russian power and its ramifications. In short, anything could have happened, but the front should not be forgotten, even though, of course, the Eurasianist machine and others will see what it wants to see, and the siloviki apparatchik and associates are prepared to leave what they have and what they don't have in the war (if it is Ukraine, nobody expects them to let up in their efforts to raze Ukraine, this is beyond any dimension of reason, not even the most twisted). In short, it is good for the siloviki not to get involved in certain aspects that Dugin and those who finance him have entered into with respect to Putin, and at the same time gain a martyr and saint, their peculiar Joan of Arc (don't be surprised to see this comparison at some point somewhere with Darya Dugina). Although I have been leaving some very juicy strokes about Russia (and China) and their ideological positions in the very large-scale geopolitical game they have initiated, I have not wanted to go into various aspects for the simple reason that I have been reading a lot of barbarities about Russia and a delusional vision of the Cold War, and the Cold War, what was left of it, has been buried by Putin. I know that a part of a left that lives without living in itself, France and particularly Germany, are not the least interested in seeing all this, although France at least on the strategic level has made progress and entered into high-intensity conflicts... but that's the way it is.

And I added a series of comments that I decided to add as a postscript to my social media post:

In the interests of clarity, and since this is a publication that should remain public, I have decided to add here what I commented yesterday on possible interpretations of the attack: I insisted on the doubts regarding the material, but above all intellectual, authorship of the attack. I stressed that there is an open war to secure Putin in the Kremlin until 2024, when he either continues or appoints a successor [review my commentary on the 2021 Russian legislative elections here]. This aspect in a regime like Russia's is of great importance and requires absolute control. I was pointing out what I have already been doing, that Russia has been left in the hands of China, but that in general terms, they are capable of assuming these facts, the same as the loss of Central Asia in the fact that they expect the control of Ukraine as the first station towards the construction of a geopolitical space assumed as Third Rome (and I was pointing out the theological absurdity of pointing out oneself as Third Rome and being the Katechon, because it is somewhat difficult to be the obstacle of that which one wants to avoid until the appointed time and the very subject that one is trying to avoid appearing: It is either one or the other, but never both).

On this issue, China on Russia, it is worth noting the following points:

Add this article by Dr. Ali Fathollah-Nejad on China and Russia in Iran.

Once China controls everything it wants from Russia and moves it towards its grand strategy, China's Belt and Road spending in Russia drops to zero. However, the focus is increasingly on the Indian Ocean, Horn of Africa, Eastern Mediterranean and Arabian Peninsula without neglecting the Balkans. Beijing shifts its investment focus particularly to Saudi Arabia but continues to buy oil and natural gas from Russia, in addition to expanding its networks and capturing resources to strengthen e-CNY. Hence the US moves with Israel, India and the United Arab Emirates with the new I2U2 grouping, while Saudi Arabia is in interesting positions vis-à-vis China.

On the other hand, in March 2022 the cost of the war to Russia was estimated at around $20 billion per day, a figure that has changed given the changes in the variables introduced with the aim of sustaining Kiev.

I continued in my commentary:

I pointed to the need to fight on illiberal terms and therefore contrary to the US presidency, and noted the importance of keeping Europe and the United States apart in terms of Russian and Chinese strategy. I gave the example of the Third Reich and Fascist Italy, as they came close to going to war with each other, but in the end had to fight together against the liberal bloc, although both pursued their own strategies, and that obviously, one had in that scenario pre-eminence over the other, so that it was convenient for Fascist Italy and the Third Reich to manage events according to their interests, and in the end, in this respect, it was the Third Reich that steered the situation, and the facts favoured it, in its favour to the detriment of Fascist Italy. I pointed to the strategic aspect of Russia and China in Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans, and noted that Russia and China are also currently playing a duo that favours China, and pointed to the case of the German establishment, where the sum of energy + technology is key, with Russia providing one and China the other; although the trend is towards reducing Russia in the equation, the presence of the Chinese component is increasing, and I pointed to the consequences of this. I noted that Russia aspires to control a large space, China has recognised Russia both implicitly and explicitly, and in return Russia is doing the same in the Far East. North Korea nuances its space vis-à-vis China in the power equation that China resolves in its favour in Central Asia by seeking out Russia. This implies the absorption of an area of the European Union and the Balkans by Russia, although China wants this to be in accordance with its interests in its ultimate form. From there, I noted that France has saved the day so far, but that what worries me is Italy and Spain (and France and Germany seem to be missing the point on several levels). At the same time, I pointed out that the bet with Germany on the part of the Russia + China duo (energy + technology) favours a scenario of stabilisation and synergy of the German establishment with Russia and China, or else that everything blows up, starting with Germany and the SPD, at which point either AfD or a new party of synthesis with other spaces, where the German establishment is defeated, China and Russia cooperate, and the pieces fall away, with Italy and Spain joining in, with the United States captured as an ideological Russian ally through the Republican Party and its drift, an aspect taken up out of interest by China to defeat and isolate the United States, the key being to defeat the Democrats in the legislative chambers, in the states and, finally, in the presidency. Russia's game in the Middle East and North Africa goes in the same direction of blocking Europe, making it dependent, trapping a part of it and preventing the formation of the EU and a large federal space with the United States, something that China also pursues in addition to Russia, although there the interests of both would be separated, generating another conflict for global dominance. He also pointed out that Dugin (and his backers) have indicated that Putin was no longer the right person to carry out this grand Russian strategy.... and that this has a weight, just as I wondered whether it was Russia's war or Putin's, and pointed out that almost six months after the war began, two out of three Russians (and before the attack) supported the evolution of events and the line with Ukraine, 22% disapprove (more and more pro-Western traitors), before the invasion it was 50% and 39% respectively. I insist, before the attack. Now I would say that the numbers are going to shoot up in favour of continuing with Ukraine and escalating the conflict, while those who oppose it... will try to keep quiet. In addition, the regime manages to close more ranks around itself.

Regarding Germany and the SPD in particular, and its positions with the Russian oligarchy and the German establishment we can see this information in DW, and this article in Der Spiegel, as well as check this front page:

And see the following chart:

Chancellor Scholz said that we need tourist visas so that persecuted Russians can escape to freedom. In my opinion the chancellor is not defending this aspect of visas in a serious and rigorous way, and is rather in tune with certain balances in his own party and the German establishment, and it can have terrible consequences. Let us imagine that someone leaves Russia and applies for asylum in the EU. Such an application will almost certainly be rejected, especially if the applicant has been able to move freely in Russia. The application criteria are strict. So now we send the applicant back to Russia with a document saying that his asylum application was rejected, which could create much bigger problems for him in the future. There is quite a powerful reason why we don't tell people to circumvent the rules and use visa fraud, although hopefully someone in the German government and the German federal administration knows this. Rather it would possibly go in another direction, as I have just suggested.

Russian media warn that if Friedrich Merz becomes German chancellor, Ukraine will join NATO and the risk of war with Russia will increase, the following article, taken at random, is an example of the insistent Russian narrative these days on this issue.

In turn, this Twitter thread is also particularly interesting, following the general content of this article:

Regarding China and Germany, as mentioned above, it is worth visiting the following link.

In addition, Russia would push for the following path:

And in Italy, the EU's second largest consumer of natural gas after Germany, Russia's pressure and quest for influence would follow a similar weapon: the use of natural gas, although Draghi's executive has reversed the path followed by Conte's executive with regard to China:

Regarding popular support for the war and its causes there is an interesting thread on Twitter that I recommend reading:

Aspects that would point to a confirmation of the approaches set out here with regard to Darya Dugina

This would be a first step in the direction of exploiting Darya Dugina's death for a greater purpose, something that Darya Douguina advocated in different media, such as Geopolitika.

This short video also provides an interesting insight to consider:

The next aspect that would confirm the scenario I anticipated on 19 March 2022 would be that the FSB goes on to accuse Ukraine of the death of Darya Dugina. In itself this would make no sense, as it would not be in Ukraine's interest to give a martyr, precisely in order to avoid as far as possible the mobilisation to which I refer on the Russian side, as well as favouring the closing of ranks, with more or less good will, around Putin and those who support him, and on whom he relies. Divide and rule is a classic that we repeat in Latin: Divide et impera.

On some of the different strategic aspects of Ukraine for Russia I recommend reviewing this article on the Sea of Azov. On Putin's vision of Ukraine, there is an article from a little over a year ago that can be read here. To this we should add the speech delivered by President Vladimir Putin on 10 February 2007 at the 43rd Security Conference in Munich:

To summarise, I recommend reading the following article entitled "Putin, Dugin, Ilyín: la matrioska del paneslavismo".

Aspects that herald certain concerns and pulses within the Russian establishment

In addition to the news of deaths of certain people (and even family members), in June 2022 we saw Alexei Navalny disappear for a few hours. He has reportedly been transferred to a high-security penitentiary in the Moscow metropolitan area.

Navalny and his disappearance for hours to be relocated to a high security prison indicates that, whether from paranoia or reality, Putin's Kremlin fears a coup d'état that could instrumentalise Navalny. Navalny has a wealth of information that he has made available to all about what Putinism and its various aspects, including corruption, have meant. This information, and other things, has been given to Navalny by someone. Someone who has it first hand. In this period, since the invasion, a reorganisation of the Russian elites is taking place, in 2024 in theory Putin will decide whether to remain at the helm of the nation or whether to give his place to someone else... furthermore the transition of hegemony has accelerated and with it the reorganisation of the world in a very intense way that will go on and on... basically, either because of paranoia from power or because of having reliable means that point in that direction (or both at the same time), Putin feared a coup d'état that would instrumentalise Navalny... or that could be the message that the Kremlin was sending with all this... although, on the other hand, we cannot rule out a "staging" for a replacement in power... it would not be the first time, and it will not be the last, to close ranks around the new leadership.

To this could also be added, among the different possibilities and motivations, the assassination of Darya Dugina, which I have been saying can be used for the mobilisation necessary for Russia at this point in the war, of which we have only experienced a prologue and which will begin to spread to other scenarios and in different ways from now on, creating windows of opportunity for Russia and China, to which must be added the midterms elections in the United States, how the distribution of power between Democrats and Republicans in different states may change, and finally, also in 2024, the presidential elections in which Trump (or another candidate but of his line, which is already the majority and hegemonic in the Republican Party) could be in tune with the ideological line followed by Russia. The following article has a double value, as it addresses Trump's vision and the fit with Russian strategy on the one hand, and on the other hand, it takes up Dugin's criticism of Putin, a criticism that can also be assigned to those who have been supporting Dugin.

Quick comment: who is Dugin?

He is the mentor of those who have been called National-Bolsheviks or NazBol, within a grand strategy of uniting reds and fascists: a current of radical thought, in that part of the continent nostalgic for the power of the USSR, starting from Stalin's assumption of the postulates of the "whites" while taking up the racist and culturalist theses of certain Nazi currents and elements of a series of elements that made up the "national-sovietism" into which the USSR drifted after Khrushchev and despite Gorbachev, with types and movements lacking a well-defined organisational structure, the most notable exception being Gumilev. Alexander Dugin is, along with Nikolai Starikov, the main theorist of "Eurasianism". This is an ideology according to which Russia seeks to dominate the Eurasian space and has more links with Asian civilisations than with Europe. It is a rather minority current that calls for Russia to distance itself from the West, which is in line with "white" thinking and efforts to stop liberalism and cosmopolitan thinking, with a project of domination, including over Ukraine.

Dugin has been calling for the annexation of Crimea to Russia for fifteen years. As for the rest of Ukraine, it is more recent. Since the beginning of the invasion, he has very clearly called for the annexation of the entire territory and population of Ukraine. This in a rather drastic line that there is no Ukrainian civilization, Ukrainian people, Ukrainian language or culture distinct from Russian civilisation. It is a negationist thesis.

Dugin's audiences for his appearances are very large. In the early 2010s, he was very close to the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and had influence over its speeches. Then he had a very clear influence on Ukrainian separatists in the self-proclaimed republics of Luhansk and Donetsk, and he is also active with Serbia. It also has proven, but not necessarily strong, connections with the presidential party United Russia. It does have intellectual influence in basic pillar sectors such as army circles.

He is a non-party figure, although he tried to create his own political formation with Limonov. Alexander Dugin is not Vladimir Putin's foreign policy advisor. He has no official position, neither in Foreign Affairs, nor in the presidential administration, nor in Defence. He is not a political figure, but a media and intellectual figure who has a strong influence on the elements of language and the way public debate is articulated in Russia. He should not become a secret advisor or a "Rasputin" to Vladimir Putin.

In general terms, there is a tendency to confuse how a mood of revanchist nationalism spread, which Putin was able to channel to his own advantage, but which by no means appeared with his coming to power in May 2000. This indignant nationalism imitates the patterns of the first generation, which was dominated by traditional themes of the Russian and European tradition in general: imperial nostalgia, anti-Semitism, Germanic-style neo-Nazism, but incorporates Russian variants, a product of the disintegration of the "sovietist-national" state that the Soviet Union had become in recent years.

In the beginning, what was most original about this phenomenon was not so much the doctrinal or discursive variants as the fact that ultra-nationalism and neo-fascism in Russia were becoming mass movements that had been developing partly as entities outside of power, even in confrontation with power, as was the case during the Yeltsin era.

A number of different elements served as a window of opportunity to gain relevance, as they had already gained in the final phase of the Soviet Union, but now out of power was something quite new in Russian history, since the ultras or anti-Semitic groups, already since their first manifestations at the beginning of the 20th century, had progressed fully protected by the government, the police authorities or even the court itself (the paradigmatic case being the Black Hundreds) or, at least, had not openly positioned themselves against them. This attitude went back to the time of Pamyat, under the Soviet regime.

Historically, however, most of these groups have also been minority, elitist, even extravagant, composed of or driven by groups of intellectuals often on the fringes of the system. The most important ones are Russian National Unity (RNE), National-Bolshevik Party (NBP), Movement Against Illegal Immigration (DPNI), Russian People's Movement (ROD), but there are more.During the Soviet period, nationalists, Aryanists or anti-Semites had gathered in clandestine groups, composed of writers, academics or dissidents. In contrast, the new and colourful groups that emerged from the wreck of the Soviet Union had a new, spontaneous, even savage quality. Their militants occupied the streets and confronted the police or even the armed forces; but among them were even military or militants of confused ideology, sometimes difficult to distinguish from the radical left or imported neo-Nazis.

And it is here, in this context, that the figure of Dugin appears, blending various currents to create an ideological but also geopolitical product that serves Russian capitalism and its interests and connections. Dugin was born into a military family, from his great-grandfather at least, to his father, who was part of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. This explains Dugin's access to Julius Evola, René Guénon, and literature of an orientalist, hermetic, occult, traditionalist, medieval historical, and so on style.

Hence the relatively light punishment he received for his dealings with the proto-ideologists or thinkers of so-called Russian traditionalism: Geydar Dzhemal, metaphysics of Islam, Yevgeny Golovin, medieval mystical literature, Yuri Mamleev, Christian philosopher, Vladimir Stepanov and Sergey Jigalkin... the leading members of the so-called Yuzhinsky Circle, a group of dissident intellectuals dating back to the 1950s.

To this he would add what was typical of a young man in the 1970s. May '68 brought with it the rise of Alain de Benoist's Nouvelle Droite, who led a new generation of ultra-rightists and neo-fascists who took to the streets, taking on the style of the radical left without complexes, to the point of giving rise to a sub-type of "anti-system ultra-right", which included syncretisms such as "anarcho-fascism" or "Nazi-Maoism" and rejected the hegemonism of the traditional currents.

It advocated overcoming fascism, Nazism and the post-war ultra-right in general, and opened up a whole constellation of formulations, proposals and revisions from which the young Dugin would draw.

The possibility of an agreed solution to the Cold War, which was the one that finally triumphed, could prepare a scenario that implied a synthesis, a third way built on overcoming the left-right dichotomy (or left-right convergence), rejecting sovietism and liberalism and repudiating the globalisation that was already perceived as imminent, clinging to the state and ignoring the reality of the functioning of geopolitical hegemonies... by fabricating recent history in order to force events and not the reality that Mitterrand had to give up his socialist-social-democratic pretensions so that neo-liberalism could be imposed, or what happened in Chile, Yugoslavia? and a long etcetera up to the present day, where Belarus is the scenario where the alleged late-Soviet regional hegemony transformed into capitalist and nationalist Russian hegemony faces the positions that are opening up in that region of Europe in this 2020-2021 arc, for the time being. This is why the laboratory of the New Right produced proposals that are still valid today and have contributed, and not a little, to the prevailing confusion between the limits and consistency of left and right-wing ideologies, fifty years later.

The New Right essentially revived the proposal of the "conservative revolution", already formulated in Germany in the interwar years, more precisely by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1927, but also in various forms by Ernst Jünger, one of Dugin's favourite authors, in the national revolution, and the "national-Bolshevism" or "red fascism" of Ernst Niekisch or Karl Otto Paetel. What fascinates Dugin about Jünger is the proposal of total mobilisation, which can be understood in a context such as the 1980s in the USSR, and which connects with the ideas of the Yuzhinsky Circle of saving the Soviet edifice with metaphysics, with the idea of transcending and conquering another vision of reality and making it prevail by disconnecting it from the one in which the Soviets have been deceived by Nixon, oil prices fall, the second Cold War begins after the détente and the Americans move the green belt, trap China and cut off the attempts to connect the FRG with the USSR by gas (doesn't that ring a bell? ).

Dugin made two visits (1989-1990, then in 1994) to France, Italy and Spain and came into contact with European far-right circles. In doing so, he displayed his real ability to generate a comprehensive schema that fitted the reality of the Russian far right and gave it a personality of its own. During this period he completed his knowledge of the New Right through its authors and works, including Alain de Benoist himself, Jean-François Thiriart, Robert Steuckers, Leon Degrelle and Claudio Mutti.

Thiriart emerged from his political exile to contribute to the founding of the European Liberation Front, in whose delegation he travelled to Moscow in 1992. There he met Dugin, and from that seed would sprout the Eurosiberia project, continued by Guillaume Faye, and the Eurasianism developed by the Russian ideologist. Dugin drew an initial synthesis of the new ideological variants of European hard nationalism, which more or less fitted into the multiform panorama of the Russian ultra-right, but endowed it with uniformity, modernity and a capacity for adaptation and integration, and Dugin brought from Europe a greater intellectual depth than that demonstrated by the new ultra-right in his country, which in many cases was reduced to simple nostalgia. In this way he filled in gaps and bridged contradictions of all kinds. And with all this, Dugin revived traditional "Eurasianism" but from a different perspective, taking on the so-called "White Russians" scattered throughout Europe in the 1920s, to which he added typically 19th-century pan-Slavic positions led by people like Vladimir Lamansky and Konstantin Leontev. In fact, Russian geopolitics just before the 1905 disaster was considering joining forces with the Second German Reich and going deeper into China, where it was confronted with Japanese ambitions.

Gumilev's presence is also necessary in order to fully understand the Russian and Dugin's vision.

In any case, Dugin also became (evidently someone will finance him, then or as a consequence), the author who retorts point by point to Brzezinski in his work The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative, and in fact in 2002 he addressed the geopolitical proposal of the Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis to break the Anglo-American pincer. Since then, they have understood and perceived the window of opportunity of the social rupture of the space between Germany and Russia, which they are trying to influence, and have added the entry into the large industrial region of northern Italy, where German, Italian, French and Russian interests coincide. Hence, for example, the increased involvement of parties such as La Lega, RN and others in the pro-euro and pro-EU scheme, because they perceive a clear change of trend that leads them to exploit what they previously despised because it could not be controlled for their purposes.... perhaps a factor that would explain the appearance and growth of forces such as Fratelli d'Italia, Reconquête in France and others that may appear in Spain (replacing Vox and being a synthesis between different positions) would be to ensure closer forces that avoid a "Europeanist" drift, and/or to have forces that are more in line with the moment of cessation in which we find ourselves, and whose vanguard in the assault on power and concentration of forces around it would be Fratelli d'Italia in the next elections in Italy.

On how Moscow wields the far right in Europe to its ends, I recommend this article.

For this part, I based myself on the book "Patriotas indignados".