From the New York Times, I'm Natalie Kichoeff. This is The Daily.

We begin in Russia where police have launched a murder investigation after the daughter of a pro-cremlin commentator was killed in a carbon explosion near Moscow.

Dead at the scene, Daria Dugina, daughter of influential ultra-nationalist Alexander Duggan. A few days ago, when a prominent supporter of Russia's invasion of Ukraine was killed in a car bomb outside of Moscow, speculation immediately turned to who had carried out the attack.

Now, as the war crosses the six-month mark, the other question is how this attack could fundamentally change the course of the conflict.

President Zelensky has warned that Russia might be planning something particularly nasty in revenge.

My colleague, Moscow Bureau Chief Anton Treyonovsky, has been covering the aftermath.

It's Thursday, August 25th.

Anton, tell me about Alexander Duggan and his daughter, Daria. Let's start with the father.

So Alexander Duggan is 60 years old. He started out as an anti-communist dissident back in the last years of the Soviet Union.

And has morphed into this self-styled, self-educated, long-haired, philosopher-slash political theorist.

And he's important because he's really one of the leading exponents of this idea of Russian imperialism, of Russia deserving and needing to be an empire that dominates this whole swath of the Eurasian territory from central Europe all the way.

What's behind that idea? What's the philosophy that actually drives it?

So the key term behind it is this concept of Eurasianism.

I always believed, and I believe, in the future, greatness of Russia, because Russia was always and tried to be super power.

It's our dream. This idea that Russia is rightfully at the center of a Eurasian empire that Russia has its own culture and values that it should kind of impose upon that empire.

It is the idea that the West should not have hegemony in defining the universal standards.

And that it's also locked in this inevitable existential conflict with what Duggan refers to as the Atlantic Empire, which, as you might imagine, is dominated by the United States.

Our position is that we are going to fight up to the end in order to show to everybody that the United States is not any more unique mustard.

It's very serious. Very serious.

I think he would say that Russia is destined to be in conflict with the United States, and that Ukraine is essentially one of those battlefields where that conflict is going to play out.

He sees Ukraine as rightfully belonging to Russia's empire, Russia's sphere of influence, and Russia needs to control Ukraine.

That does sound similar to a lot of what Putin has said about this war.

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