The puzzling suicide of Vladimir Putin critic Dan Rapoport (above with wife) and the car-bomb killing of Daria Dugina draw alarming parallels to Russian-intelligence hit jobs, a k a "special tasks."

Last weekend, Russians were shocked by a car bomb that instantly killed the daughter of one of Vladimir Putin’s closest allies, the ultra-nationalist political theorist Aleksandr Dugin. Images showed Daria Dugina’s Toyota Land Cruiser blazing in the dark, as her father — also known as Putin’s brain — stood just feet away in shock, grabbing his head with his hands.

Dugina’s death outside Moscow follows another bizarre event just one week earlier in Washington, DC. A Soviet-born Putin critic living in exile in the United States “jumped” to his death from his high-rise apartment building in an upscale neighborhood of the capital. The jumper was Dan Rapoport, a businessman who had strongly criticized Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Both deaths sound like something out of a Tom Clancy novel. But the world of Russian espionage is even more bizarre than fiction.While the DC police didn’t deem Rapoport’s death suspicious, it is right out of Putin’s playbook. Russia has been behind scores of targeted assassinations since the Soviet era. Shots in the back of the head, poisonings, forced suicides and other intricate forms of violent death are all part of the doctrine known as “wet affairs” — or the spilling of blood.

It is entirely too early to conclusively say who is responsible for the death of Dugina, a Kremlin propagandist. While the FSB, Russia’s spy agency, blamed Ukraine for the attack, Ukraine said Russia’s anti-war resistance force was responsible. But some think that Putin and his henchmen could have been behind the hit, arguing that martyring the only child of a great ally offers an excellent pretext for escalating even harsher attacks against Ukraine, with the war at a stalemate six months in. 

While it’s extremely unlikely that Putin would kill the child of a Mother-Russia nationalist compatriot, striking at the heart of the very ideology that underpins his war on Ukraine, he has used unthinkable tactics on his own people before. Many believe he ordered FSB officials to bomb apartment buildings in Moscow, killing between 200 and 300 residents in 1999, in order to blame Chechen terrorists for the attacks and give Russia a reason to unleash war on Chechnya. Putin’s popularity as prime minister rose as a result, helping him win the Russian presidency in March 2000.

These dirty deeds — or “special tasks” — are carried out by Russian military intelligence operatives and include killings, kidnappings, poisonings, “forced suicides,” and other acts of intimidation and murder. Throwing a victim out of a window or making the victim jump is a very common tactic, along with staging car explosions and other tragic accidents.