watch it be an EU or US hit team so he turns out not to be lying

CIA did it. CIA and maybe the French can get boots on the ground to run ops in Russia. No fucking way Ukraine could.

Basically, any actual powerful Russian figure would have protection, so they killed someone without protection who non-Russians think is powerful.

Makes sense

At first I thought he was some sort of russian kissinger, but that's not the case. That being said, the tweet at the beginning of the DS article saying essentially that he was a nobody barely anyone ever heard about in the russian gov is a tad caricatural, to say the least, for a guy nicknamed "putin's brain"...

He wasn't exactly a "nobody" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Dugin

Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin (Russian: Александр Гельевич Дугин; born 7 January 1962) is a Russian political philosopher,[6][7] analyst, and strategist, known for his fascist views.[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]

Born into a military family, Dugin was an anti-communist dissident during the 1980s.[18] Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Dugin co-founded the National Bolshevik Party with Eduard Limonov, a party which espoused National Bolshevism, which he later left.[19] In 1997, he published Foundations of Geopolitics where he outlined his worldview, calling for Russia to rebuild its influence through alliances and conquest, and to challenge the rival Atlanticist "empire" led by the United States.[8][20][21][9] Dugin continued to further develop his ideology of neo-Eurasianism, founding the Eurasia Party in 2002 and writing further books including The Fourth Political Theory (2009).[8][18]

Dugin also served as an advisor to the State Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznyov,[22] and a leading member of the ruling United Russia party, Sergey Naryshkin.[23] He was the head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at Moscow State University from 2009 to 2014, losing the position due to backlash over comments regarding clashes in Ukraine.[24]

Dugin's influence within the Russian government and on Russian president Vladimir Putin is disputed,[8] with Dugin sometimes being referred to as "Putin's brain",[25] responsible for shaping Russian foreign policy,[26][27][28] while others contend that Dugin's influence within the government is limited and has been greatly exaggerated,[9] an impression given by correlations between his work and Russian foreign policy.[29]

Ref [25] is NPR

And ref [9] is bloomberg, paywalled...

...

Who should I believe...