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On August 20, Daria Dugina, daughter of an extreme-right ultra-nationalist Russian ideologue, was killed in a car bomb explosion. Speculation abounds who was behind the bomb attack, with the Kremlin claiming it was an act of Western-sponsored Ukrainian terrorism.

Now Russians-in-excile news site meduza has published an intriguing interview with Ilya Ponomarev, a former (Russian) Duma lawmaker who claims to be fighting on the Ukrainian side. According to him, the attack was an action by a resistance group within Russia calling themselves the National Republican Association (NRA).

In how far Ponomarev is a reliable source, with his family having (had) extensive connections within the Russian power elite, is unclear, but two items sprang to my attention in the interview. First is that he mentions the detail that Dugina wasn't the only victim, and that there was another, unreported, person killed too.

The second is that Ponomarev used to work closely with Vladimir Surkov.

Surkov is a long-term Putin associate, the man behind Russia's so-called "managed democracy". The last week of April this year he suddenly got house arrest, being accused of corruption and looting in Donbass, of all places (Surkov was already fired of his Kremlin job in 2020 and has held no official positions since, let alone had any presence in Ukraine's Donbass territory).

The week after Surkov's arrest, an odd article appeared in the online version of Pravda, which is owned by another associate of Surkov. That article heavily criticized the Putin and Medvedev administrations, calling them parasites clinging to power by any and all means.