To follow up on the assassination of Aleksandr Dugin's daughter last night: the balance of probability for an assassination in Moscow is always the Russian FSB, possibly with the involvement of organised crime, not the Ukrainian SBU.
https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1561175288771387393
#pt: It is not *impossible* to construct a motive for the Ukrainian SBU trying to assassinate Dugin, but the SBU knows what apparently most Westerners do not: that Dugin is not a domestic power player, politically or ideologically, in the Kremlin.
#pt: If the Ukrainians had been able to infiltrate Moscow with a hit team, there are so many much more operationally significant targets they could have chosen. Dugin seems unlikely.
One should say in such a scenario it is possible, since Dugin is notorious *in the West*, he was chosen, because it guaranteed attention internationally. But again, it seems unlikely.
https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1561290229327200257
#pt: In terms of why the FSB would target Dugin - or his daughter: still unclear who was targeted - the potential motives, political and personal, are almost endless.
#pt: The most obvious political motive for the Russian FSB to target Dugin is, again because he is well-known in the West, killing him is guaranteed to gain international attention and blaming it on the Ukrainians provides a pretext for escalation in Ukraine.
#pt: Dugin being targeted, or his daughter being killed as a warning, over some kind of personal grudge is also not beyond the realms of possibility, especially given the hazy line between the FSB and Russian organised crime.
Almost certainly lol
https://twitter.com/eugene_finkel/status/1561265193308536832
In the set-up to the Czechoslovak invasion in 1968, the Soviets "found" American weapons among "counter-revolutionaries" in Prague, demonstrating a NATO coup was being planned. Everyone remembers the provocations at the beginning of the Ukraine invasion. kyleorton.substack.com/p/socialism-co…
This practice is so routine to the Russian intelligence services, which inherit directly the personnel and tradecraft of the KGB, the FSB being behind an assassination attempt on Dugin should not seem in the least unlikely.
https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1561294146828214273
The Russian neo-Nazi Rusich squad sent in as part of the invasion force is being killed off at quite the rate in Ukraine. One might almost call it "denazification".
https://twitter.com/LostWeapons/status/1561281135635615745
The free speech framing of the Graham Phillips sanctions seems to wilfully miss the point. The man is working as an agent of a hostile foreign government, based in territory it occupies. Letting him use his finances within Britain would be mad.
https://twitter.com/spectator/status/1561237495957823488
Latest @DefenceHQ update focuses on the recently arrested Igor Girkin, #Russia's main agent in #Ukraine in 2014-15 and a recently outspoken critic of the way the invasion was run. Notes Girkin recently "posted a grudgingly admiring critique" of President Zelensky. 
Ilya Ponomarev, a former Russian Duma deputy, alleged from Kiev that the explosion that killed Dugin's daughter was the work of an underground anti-Putin group called "the National Republican Army". This is highly dubious. theguardian.com/world/2022/aug…
The two most likely options here are: (1) Ponomarev is wrong/making this up; or (2) he believes he is in touch with such an organisation, which is an FSB creature modelled on the TRUST operation.
https://twitter.com/KyleWOrton/status/1561489512735334403
Another intercepted call showing the low morale of #Russia's army
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1561368655757131776
#Albania: Four more people arrested at another weapons depot
https://twitter.com/UnaHajdari/status/1561324300627578881
#Ukraine's President Zelensky says #Russia putting the final defenders of Mariupol through a show trial will end all negotiation tracks with Moscow.
https://twitter.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1561651235824062464
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