The daughter of a prominent Russian extremist aligned closely with President Vladimir Putin was killed in a suspected car bomb outside of Moscow on Saturday.
Russian press reports indicate that Alexander Dugin was the likely target. He was supposed to have been the driver of the Toyota in which his daughter, Darya Dugina, was found dead, but at the last minute switched cars.
Video on Russia media shows a man, who appears to be Dugin, showing anguish as he watches the car engulfed in flames. Darya, 30, served as a pro-Kremlin TV commentator. A family friend published a Telegram statement on behalf of Dugin, who called his daughter's killing "a terrorist act by the Ukrainian Nazi regime.”
But other Russian watchers are not so sure.
Russia remains close to a near police state. The ability of terrorist or criminal gangs to operate are effectively licensed by the state police.
Did Putin orchestrate the attempt to kill Dugin to drum up nationalist support for a war effort that is increasingly unpopular to Russians?
Another theory holds that high-level people in the state security services or Kremlin, by killing an adviser linked to the war effort, were sending a message to Putin to stop his special military operation and cut his losses.
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said Monday that it had solved the case and, without providing clear evidence, said Ukraine was responsible.
Ukrainian officials have denied any involvement.
Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said the bombing was the latest attempt in Russia at escalation in order to get an excuse for a general mobilization for the war against Ukraine.
"They will use this to increase ideological and informational pressure on Russian society," Podolyak said. "They want it to become even more ultra-radical."
Russia expert Edward Lucas said "the denials in Ukraine are very credible."
"It doesn't make sense. If Ukraine was able to run hit squads in the heart of Moscow willing to kill people, I don't think Dugin would be top of their target list," Lucas said during an interview with Times Radio posted on YouTube. "I think it's more likely to be some sort of internal machination."
Lucas added that a mixed ideology existed in Russia society, which consisted of people yearning for a return of life under the Soviet Union, others wanting to go back further, to the era under Tsars, and others following a sort of Russian fascism, that's more ethnic-based and more modern.
"Dugin was pretty close to a Nazi, to be honest, and his rhetoric about the Ukrainians as sort of subhumans and not really existing had real echoes of Nazis or sort of exterminationists' rhetoric toward Slavs, and Jews, and others," Lucas said.
Lucas said the bombing could be seen as "validation" of Dugin's beliefs, that enemies tried to silence the writer, or a message against criticizing Putin.
However, a former member of Russia's Duma, who was expelled for anti-Kremlin activities, claimed Sunday that the deadly explosion was the work of an underground group working inside Russia dedicated to overthrowing the Putin regime, The Guardian reported.
"This action, like many other partisan actions carried out on the territory of Russia in recent months, was carried out by the National Republican Army," Ilya Ponomarev said, speaking on his YouTube channel.
The United States imposed sanctions on Dugin in 2015 for being "responsible for or complicit in actions or policies that threaten the peace, security, stability, or sovereignty or territorial integrity of Ukraine."
Reuters contributed to this story.