WRONG COFFIN, SWEETIE:

[B]y the end of the decade, Dugina was fully her father's daughter (despite using the pseudonym Darya Platonova, presumably derived from her interest in Plato). In a 2021 YouTube interview, she declared that it was "a great honor to be the daughter of such a man" and that she was "proudly carrying the banner of being a daughter." In addition to serving as Dugin's press secretary, she was a hardcore activist in his "Eurasia movement" and a speaker at its events, as well as a writer for pro-government outlets and a pundit with regular appearances on Kremlin-controlled broadcast media.

Having once described Ukraine on Russian television as a "cordon sanitaire" separating Russia from Europe, Dugina enthusiastically embraced Russia's invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. On her Telegram channel, she wrote:

Last night I was walking along a deserted Moscow street, and far away a Russian flag was billowing on a building. And a quiet rustle: the Russians are coming. Woman's intuition is a powerful thing. For some reason, this quiet and this flag caught my attention. A slogan in my head: "Empire, be!" I woke up, and there was empire.

In mid-June, Dugina went to Mariupol to tour the Azovstal plant where the city's Ukrainian defenders took their last stand. On her return, she enthused in a post on VKontakte, the Russian analogue of Facebook:

For me, Novorossiya [i.e., Eastern Ukraine] is a space of philosophical meaning. It is Russia's empire-forming space, and it is thanks to this frontier horizon that we exist as Russia: What's more, an unvanquished Russia, a Russia risen against the totalitarian liberalism that is being imposed all over the world. . . . It is there that the right attitudes toward life and death, toward self and other, have been constructed; it is there that the meanings of our empire are being formed. . . . One must go to Novorossiya to learn what life is, to learn how one should live, to learn what the breath of empire is and what empire is. . . . It is created to awaken us.

In an appearance on Russia's state-controlled Channel One, Dugina asserted with a straight face that what Russia was actually doing in Mariupol was "trying to reclaim the peaceful population from death." It turns out, however, that she wasn't talking about literal death: "Death is the loss of community," she explained, with a reference to the nineteenth-century German Romantic poet Novalis. "In Ukraine, this community, this unity of the people, was lost; a whole bunch of groups appeared with an aggressive ideology, with absolute Russophobia." What Novorossiya really needs, she concluded, is "the introduction of ideology." Oh, and tribunals for the "Nazis" and "non-humans" fighting for the Ukrainian side.

On other occasions, Dugina claimed that the killings in Bucha were staged in order to "convince the Western public of the Russians' bloody crimes" and that Bucha was chosen for this purpose because of its name's similarity to the word "butcher" in order to implant the trope of Putin as a butcher in people's minds.

On the very last day of her life, Dugina appeared on an online propaganda show to claim that the "special operation" in Ukraine was the "final nail in the coffin" of Western "liberal totalitarianism"...

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