MOSCOW, August 23./TASS/. The family, friends, dozens of colleagues and acquaintances of Darya Dugina got together at Ostankino TV Center on Tuesday to bid their final farewell to the journalist killed in a car bomb attack outside Moscow late on Saturday.
"She had no fear, really. And the last time we talked at the festival Tradition, she said: Daddy, I feel like a warrior, I feel like a hero, <...> I want to be with my country. I want to be on the light side of the force," Darya’s father, philosopher and public figure Alexander Dugin, said.
He said he had wanted to bring up his daughter the way he saw the ideal person. "The first words that we taught her as a child were ‘Russia’, ‘our state’, ‘our people’ and ‘our empire’," he added.
Attending the ceremony among others were Deputy Speaker of the State Duma (lower house) Sergey Neverov, Leonid Slutsky, LDPR leader and head of the State Duma Committee for International Affairs, and Sergey Mironov, leader of A Just Russia - For Truth party.
Producer Eduard Boyakov read out Dugina's poems on the events in eastern Ukraine. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov sent a telegram of condolence to Dugina's parents.
About Darya Dugina
Early in summer, Darya was in the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, covering the events. In Donbass, she also worked for a French media outlet, since her French was perfect. The girl also collected information on the Azov nationalist battalion, outlawed in Russia.
An explosive device went off in a Toyota Land Cruiser that Dugina was driving on a highway near the village of Bolshiye Vyazyomy, in the Moscow Region, on August 20. Darya was returning from the literary and musical festival Tradition, where she was a special guest. It was established that a bomb had been planted under the vehicle on the driver's side. The Federal Security Service, the FSB, told TASS on Monday that Dugina’s murder had been solved. According to the federal agency, it had been masterminded by the Ukrainian secret services and carried out by Ukrainian national Natalia Vovk, who fled to Estonia following the killing.
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a decree to award the Order of Courage posthumously to Russian journalist and public activist Darya Dugina.