Earlier this week in Russia, there was a televised funeral for Daria Dugina, just days after she was killed in a car bombing in Moscow.

Dugina was a Russian propagandist who supported her country’s invasion of Ukraine, both on TV and online. Her death made global headlines, both for its violence and because of the political prominence of her father, Alexander Dugin.

It also signaled that Moscow’s elite may not be safe in their own city, said Marlene Laruelle, the director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University.

“The war is progressively coming to them in the Russian territory,” she said.

“The message the killing is sending, even if we cannot interpret exactly who did that and who the actual target was, is that if you can have a terrorist act in Moscow, in the middle of the war, it means elites are suddenly not feeling secure anymore.”

Laruelle joined All Things Considered to discuss Alexander Dugin’s rise and waning influence, how he spread his ideology across the world, and what Daria Dugina’s death may mean politically.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

On Alexander Dugin’s origins

He was pretty famous in the ’90s because he was one of the first ones in Russia to formulate a kind of political language of Russia’s great power and empire. But in the 2000s, he really lost some of his prominence, and there are many other ideologies who appeared who are much more influential on the regime’s kind of strategy. He has been pretty marginalized inside Russia. He’s more famous abroad than in Russia itself.

On his beliefs towards Ukraine

He has had very anti-Ukrainian ideology since the beginning, which is some of his most famous work in the mid-90s. He was saying that Ukraine doesn’t exist as a state, as a nation, that it’s a construction of the West as a kind of anti-Russian strategy.

And that’s something that was not so common at that time. But after that, he really has been working on many other countries, creating a big geopolitical vision for Russia as an empire, and he has always been very anti-Ukrainian, to the point that Ukraine has forbidden him from entering Ukrainian territory already for about 15 years. In the mid-2000s he was already persona non grata in Ukraine.

On whether there is any knowledge of Dugin’s influence on Vladmir Putin

No, we’re not even sure they have met. Putin has never quoted Dugin, Dugin is not part of any official institution, like several other ideologies. He’s only on the small internet channel, the far right, orthodox channel. So he’s not among the classic propagandists that are actually invited on talk shows.

His daughter was, and that’s what is interesting. His daughter was more mainstream in a sense, and she was able to be invited to all of these provocative talk shows. He has been pretty marginal, because his thinking is not an easy one to follow. It’s super philosophical, and religious, so it’s not something you can air on television very easily and get a big audience for.

On Dugin’s popularity among international far-right communities

He’s really a big name in contemporary far-right thinking. First, because he has been speaking a lot of foreign languages, so he was able to read all of the European far-right productions, to translate in Russia, and also to translate his own work in English, French, German, Italian, Arabic, and Iranian.

So he has really been able to develop networks of international, transnational, far-right people, up to Latin America. He was able to articulate a narrative of this new empire of conservative values against the so-called decadent West and liberal culture and so on. It’s really a narrative that has resonated with a lot of European interests among the far right groups.

On what Daria Dugin’s death may mean politically

I think her death will be used by the conservative reactionary groups to kind of create a martyr out of her. She was a young, good looking woman, so that will help to create the myth of her martyrdom. I think her death will be used globally, not only by the conservative circles but also by the regime, for some kind of domestic repression. The regime will have to showcase that it can answer to a terrorist act, and that will probably mean higher repression.

This story was adapted for the web by Manuela Lopez Restrepo.

Florida is rolling out a mobile unit to administer monoclonal antibody treatments to coronavirus patients, Gov. Ron DeSantis announced.

Officials are expanding the availability of the treatments, which have emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, as a record number of new coronavirus infections is straining Florida’s health care system.

“There’s clear benefits to this early treatment for keeping people out of the hospital and reducing mortality,” DeSantis said during a Thursday news conference.

Monoclonal antibodies — which hold the coronavirus in check by mimicking the body’s natural immune defenses — can be used to treat people with mild to moderate COVID-19 who are 12 years of age or older. But the treatment doesn’t work for those who’ve already developed more severe symptoms or are hospitalized.

Both vaccinated and unvaccinated people who are infected can receive the treatments, officials said.

Former President Donald Trump received Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatment when he contracted coronavirus last fall.

But some states have struggled to make the treatment widely available since it is administered by an intravenous infusion that can take up to an hour and requires medical staff that may already be overworked.

While announcing the new rollout, DeSantis noted that monoclonal antibody treatments may not be as well-known in the battle against COVID-19 because they received emergency authorization around the same time that the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines also did.

Florida is looking to offer monoclonal antibody treatments at other locations throughout the state, and it will send “strike teams” into long-term care facilities to offer the treatment to older residents and others where they live.

The state has become a hot spot for new COVID-19 cases in recent weeks as the highly contagious delta variant has caused transmission rates to explode.

Still, DeSantis has resisted forcing students, many of whom are under age 12 and ineligible for the vaccine, to wear masks during the upcoming school year. He has threatened to withhold funding from any school districts that don’t let parents choose whether their children wear masks, though several counties have ignored the threat and kept their mask mandates or imposed new requirements.

The National Hurricane Center has issued a rare hurricane watch for parts of New England, warning that Tropical Storm Henri will likely develop into a hurricane before making landfall on the northeastern U.S. coast this weekend.

“If Henri strikes southeast New England as a hurricane this weekend, it will be the first direct hurricane landfall since Bob in 1991,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration spokesman Chris Vaccaro told NPR.

Henri’s maximum sustained winds grew to 70 mph on Friday, making it “almost a hurricane,” the NHC said in its 2 p.m. ET update. Hurricanes have sustained winds of at least 74 mph.

The hurricane watch was issued early Friday, covering a large portion of Long Island and areas from New Haven, Conn., to Sagamore Beach, Mass., the National Hurricane Center said. Resort islands such as Block Island, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket are also in the watch zone.

In addition to strong winds and heavy rain, forecasters are warning of a storm surge that could inundate land with 3 to 5 feet of water.

“Confidence is high that the event will occur Sunday into Monday,” the National Weather Service office in Boston said in a briefing early Friday. It added that damaging winds were especially possible east of Henri’s track, while rains could cause flooding to the west of the storm’s path.

A hurricane watch means that hurricane conditions are possible within the watch area; forecasters normally issue the alerts roughly 48 hours before they expect the first tropical storm-force winds to arrive. The first tropical storm winds from Henri could reach the shore late Saturday.

New England is under its first hurricane watch in years

When the NHC issued its advisory early Friday, “it had been nearly TEN YEARS since a Hurricane Watch has been issued for Southern New England,” meteorologist Aaron Perry of NBC Boston said on Twitter.

Henri is expected to bring 2 to 5 inches of rain to eastern Long Island and southern New England, with some areas seeing nearly 8 inches.

“The soil is going to get saturated, in some places it’s already saturated,” NHC Director Ken Graham said in a midday update on the storm. He added, “Put some winds on top of that, you’re going to knock down a lot of trees. You’re going to have power outages.”

Graham urged residents and travelers to be vigilant, warning of “significant impacts” from Henri.

The hurricane watch for Henri comes just one day after the 30th anniversary of Hurricane Bob’s landfall on New England.

Bob wrecked swaths of the coast and knocked out electricity in Cape Cod and other areas — in some cases, for as long as two weeks.

“At least 17 people were killed in the storm, the costliest in New England with more than $1.5 billion in property damage,” The Associated Press reports.

Henri’s impact will depend on its path and timing

At midday on Friday, Henri was roughly parallel with the Georgia-Florida line, hundreds of miles from the coast. The storm was moving northwest, but it is expected to make a sharp right turn toward the north.

It’s expected to strengthen over the next two days as it traverses very warm waters, likely becoming a hurricane by Saturday. It will then cross the north wall of the Gulf Stream.

“Henri’s expected slower motion over the colder water south of New England should induce quick weakening,” the hurricane center said in its 8 a.m. ET forecast, “but it may not be quick enough to keep Henri from reaching the coast as a hurricane.”

The effect of the storm’s slow pace is unclear. As member station WBUR reports:

“The slow movement may mean that it turns up the waters of the coastline. This mixing would cool the waters, causing the storm to lose its strength rather fast. But on the other side of the coin, slow movement can allow a lot of rain to fall, and could cause storm surge to last longer.”

Hurricane Grace is bearing down on Mexico

People along Mexico’s central eastern coast are bracing for the arrival of Hurricane Grace, which is currently packing sustained winds up to 85 mph, the National Hurricane Center said on Friday.

A hurricane warning is in effect along the coast, from Puerto Veracruz to Cabo Rojo.

“A Hurricane Warning means that hurricane conditions are expected somewhere within the warning area, in this case within 24 hours,” the NHC said.