While the Kiev regime has so far denied its involvement in Dugina’s murder, the Washington Post has reported citing its sources that the assassination was orchestrated by Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU).
The newspaper’s sources also alleged that the US Central Intelligence Agency has invested a lot of money and effort since 2015 to turn Ukraine’s intelligence services into “potent allies against Moscow.”
Commenting on this development, retired CIA intelligence officer and State Department official Larry Johnson suggests that the timing of the WaPo’s revelations may not be coincidental.
“You have to ask yourself, why was this published now? Because this was not just created on a whim. There is a purpose behind this. I take it as an indication that the CIA realizes that the war in Ukraine is lost and that it's not going to succeed,” he told Sputnik. “Therefore, they're starting to put out their story about, hey, look, here's all the good stuff we tried to do. And it's not our fault. The Ukrainians sometimes went off the reservation and did bad things.”
According to Johnson, the CIA should probably seek to distance itself from the crimes committed by the SBU and Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, who seem increasingly focused on assassinating people they brand as enemies of Ukraine.
“If you've got people that are doing things that you see as counterproductive to your policy and in this case actually murdering journalists, that is a violation for the CIA. But again, the CIA has their persons within the ranks who find ways to excuse that, justify and say that it's okay,” he remarked.
Referring to the part of the newspaper’s report that broached the subject of the CIA providing training to Ukrainian intelligence services, Johnson wondered aloud what exactly did this training involve, seeing how the techniques mentioned in the article – for example, the way the bomb that killed Dugina was smuggled into Russia – have little to do with actual intelligence work.
“The goal of intelligence is to recruit people from the other side who have access to information you want and cannot get through any other means. And you want to recruit them and have them provided that information without tipping off the other side that you have access to that information,” he explained.
Johnson also said he thinks “Russia has far better human intelligence on what Ukraine is going to do than Ukraine has on what Russia is going to do.”
Regarding the potential risks Ukrainian intelligence services may present to those who support them, Johnson described them as minimal, noting that the problem may arise “if members of the GUR or SBU feel that they were betrayed by the West.”
“And then there's always the possibility that they could try to seek revenge out of that. But again, I think this decision to publish this story is all about, I think, the end game of U.S. policy in support for Ukraine. It's not the flag in a problem per se, but it's just the CIA basically saying, here's what we've tried to do and it's not our fault,” he surmised.
Daria Dugina was murdered on August 20, 2022, when an explosive device that had been planted in her car detonated.
An investigation conducted by the Russian authorities established that the bomb was planted by Ukrainian national Natalia Vovk who worked for the Ukrainian special services, the mastermind behind Dugina’s murder.