With his extravagant beard and wild rhetoric, Alexander Dugin has found it easy to attract attention. Some have even labelled the far-right philosopher “Putin’s brain” or “Rasputin”. Other commentators, however, have dismissed the idea that Dugin is taken particularly seriously in the Kremlin, pointing to the fact that he lost his job at Moscow State University in 2014.

Still, somebody obviously took Dugin very seriously indeed. Last weekend, his daughter Daria Dugina, a nationalist journalist, was murdered by a car bomb outside Moscow. It is widely assumed that Dugin himself was the real target.

Whatever the personal relationship between Putin and Dugin, the Russian leader’s decision to invade Ukraine brought to fruition ideas that Dugin has been pushing since the early 1990s. In his 1997 book, Foundations of Geopolitics, which was assigned reading at the Russian military’s general staff academy, Dugin argued that “Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning”.