Ukraine Update….170 days into the Russian move on the Ukraine…

• The daughter of Alexander Dugin, referred to as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s “brain,” was killed in a car explosion overnight in the Moscow region, according to Russia’s main investigative authority, which said it was opening a criminal murder investigation. Daria Dugina, 29,was reportedly driving her father’s car from a festival they had both attended when the vehicle erupted in flames, per Russia’s state-run media outlet Tass.
• Ukraine denied involvement and suggested it could be the result of an internal dispute within Russia. “I emphasize that we certainly had nothing to do with it,” Mykhailo Podolyak, adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, said Sunday on Ukrainian television. Dugina had been sanctioned by the United States as part of a list of Russian elites and Russian intelligence-directed disinformation outlets, alongside her father, who has been designated for sanctions since 2015.
• Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said he has “not yet been briefed” on Dugina’s killing. “I couldn’t say who was behind it,” he told CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “There are so many factions and internecine warfare within Russian society, within the Russian government, anything is possible.” He said he hoped the attack, on a civilian, “wasn’t something emanating from Ukraine.”
• This week marks six months since the invasion,Zelensky noted in his nightly address. It also brings the nation’s Flag Day on Tuesday. He hinted at the prospect that Russia this week “may try to do something particularly nasty, something particularly cruel. Such is our enemy.” The city of Kharkiv will be under curfew all day on Ukrainian Independence Day on Wednesday, its regional governor, Oleh Synyehubov, said. Kyiv has banned mass events from Monday through Thursday, Ukraine’s parliament said.
• The head of the Security Service of Ukraine in the central Kirovohrad region was found fatally shot in his apartment, according to the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office. Oleksandr Nakonechnyi’s death is being investigated.
• Zelensky drew another red line in potential negotiations with Moscow to end the war, saying Ukraine would walk away from talks if mass show trials of soldiers captured in Mariupol proceed. Zelensky issued the warning in his Sunday address: “This will be the line beyond which any negotiations are impossible,” he said. Reports of planned trials have circulated for weeks and intensified after Russian media published images of cages under construction, said to be meant for Ukrainians captured during the siege of the Azovstal steel mill.

• Russia increased its Black Sea presence this weekend,to two naval vessels and five missile carriers with more than 30 Caliber-type missiles, according to Ukraine’s Operational Command South.
• Russian shelling in a small central Ukrainian city killed at least one person, injured seven others and destroyed homes and a school building, local officials said. The Sunday strike, in the Dnipropetrovsk region, is at least the second major attack on the area, which has come under increased fire as the standoff over the nearby Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has escalated.
• Drone attacks, including one on the headquarters of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, were reported in Crimea on Saturday. The governor of Sevastopol, a Russian appointee, said a drone hit the roof of the fleet’s headquarters after Russian forces were unable to shoot it down. But he later reversed his claim, saying in a “clarification” on Telegram that the drone was struck and landed on the roof, catching fire. “There was no defeat,” he wrote. The claims could not be independently verified.
• The Russian-backed occupation mayor of Mariupol survived a recent assassination attempt, a Ukrainian official reported. While the attack failed, it was “only the beginning,” Petro Andriushchenko, an adviser to Mariupol’s exiled mayor, wrote on Telegram. He lamented that efforts to depose the head of the local puppet government were “so far not very successful,” but if confirmed, the attempt would demonstrate a still-active resistance in the ruined port city.
• Russian forces’ attempted advance toward the southern city of Mykolaiv, which they have shelled repeatedly in recent days, has seen “partial success,” the Ukrainian army conceded in one of its regular updates, which rarely acknowledge Russia’s battlefield gains. Moscow’s soldiers occupy a small settlement less than 30 miles from Mykolaiv, but “combat is ongoing,” the army reported….

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Here’s what you need to know:

• The daughter of an influential Russian writer was killed on a highway west of Moscow.

• Daria Dugina was a Russian hawk who railed against the West’s ‘global hegemony.’

• The death of Dugina opens a new chapter in the history of political assassinations in Russia.

• For a former rebel in West Africa, the decision to take Moscow’s side in its war with Ukraine was never in doubt.

• A Russia-backed official escapes a blast in Mariupol, as Moscow presses its offensive in the east.

• Perceived mishaps to Germany’s war response add to its leader’s rocky start.

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