MOSCOW (AFP) -- Russia vowed “no mercy” for the killers of Daria Dugina, the daughter of an ultranationalist intellectual, as hundreds gathered for her funeral following her death in a car bomb blast over the weekend.
“I believe that this is a barbaric crime for which there is no forgiveness,” Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told journalists on Tuesday, calling for “no mercy” for those responsible.
Moscow says Ukrainian intelligence was behind the attack -- a claim dismissed by Kyiv.
Alexander Dugin -- a vocal supporter of the Kremlin’s military campaign who has claimed to be close to President Vladimir Putin -- may have been the intended target of the attack that killed his 29-year-old daughter.
Mourners -- many carrying flowers -- paid their respects at a hall in Moscow’s Ostankino TV centre where her black-and-white portrait was displayed over an open casket.
Dugin and his wife, both dressed in black, sat next to their daughter’s coffin.
“She died for the people, for Russia, at the front. The front -- it is here,” Dugin said at the ceremony.
“Since childhood, among her first words -- that we taught her of course -- were Russia, our state, our people, our empire,” he added.
Dugina was killed Saturday when a bomb placed in her car went off as she drove on a highway outside Moscow.
Russia’s powerful FSB security agency said on Monday it had solved the crime -- just two days after the incident -- naming a Ukrainian woman as Dugina’s attacker.
It said the perpetrator had rented an apartment in the same building as Dugina and followed her in a car, suggesting that Dugina was the intended victim.
However, Russian media reported that Dugin and his daughter had had a last-minute change of plans, with Dugina driving her father’s car.
The U.S. Department of State said on Monday that it condemned targeting civilians, while stating that Ukraine had denied any involvement.
Russia’s foreign ministry retorted that Washington’s reaction “discredits the international activity” of the United States.
“Washington has no moral right... to judge human rights in remote parts of the world, since the murder of a journalist is not even commented on from this angle,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on social media.
Dugin, 60, gained prominence in the 1990s in the intellectual chaos that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union. He had been an anti-communist dissident in the last years of Soviet rule.