situation in Donbas: "The humanitarian crisis has long since been raging on the territory of Novorossiya. Already up to a million, if not more, refugees are in the Russian Federation. A large part of the inhabitants of the DPR and the LPR simply moved abroad." In the end of October 2014, Dugin advised the separatists to establish dictatorship in Novorossiya until they win in the confrontation. Influence on Putin Dugin's influence on the Russian government and on president Vladimir Putin is disputed. He has no official ties to the Kremlin, but is often referred to in the media as "Putin's brain", and as being responsible for shaping Russian foreign policy. Others contend that Dugin's influence is limited and has been greatly exaggerated, on the basis that the correlations between his views and Russian foreign policy do not imply causation. In 2016, international relations professor Peter Rutland wrote a review of a book by Charles Clover, the Financial Times's Moscow correspondant. Rutland wrote:"Clover makes it clear that Dugin does not have any sort of direct influence over Putin. Rather what is happening is that Dugin expressed, early on, the zeitgeist of post-Soviet Russia, identifying the forces of disorientation and ressentiment that fueled Putin’s subsequent actions."Mark Galeotti, writing in 2022 for The Spectator, argued that Western commentators tend to overstate the importance of Dugin in Russian politics, sometimes even describing him as a new Rasputin. He argued that Dugin's influence on the politics since 2016 was negligible, but that he tried to present himself as an influential person. In November 2022, the Latvia-based newspaper Meduza reported that, according to sources close to the Kremlin, Dugin's influence on Putin had grown after the killing of his daughter Daria Dugina. According to Meduza's interlocutors, the Western media had often exaggerated Dugin's political influence in the past, but after the murder of Dugina, Putin had allegedly started to take a serious interest in his ideas and to use one of his favourite terms ("Anglo-Saxon") in a public speech. Dugin openly criticized Putin for failing to defend "Russian cities" such as Kherson, which was liberated from Russian control on 11 November 2022. Relationships with radical groups in other countries Dugin made contact with the French far-right thinker Alain de Benoist in 1990. Around the same time he also met the Belgian Jean-François Thiriart and Yves Lacoste. In 1992 he invited some of the European far-right figures