As the daughter of Vladimir Putin's mentor, journalist Ksenia Sobchak can afford to criticize Russia's attack on Ukraine. But then the police are at her door. However, the 41-year-old escapes to Lithuania. After a week in exile, the Kremlin critic is now returning to her homeland.
Prominent Russian journalist and former presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak has returned to Russia. This is reported by several media, citing eyewitnesses who claim to have seen the 41-year-old crossing the Russian-Latvian border. Sources close to the Sobchak family reportedly confirmed their return. The government critic had fled to Lithuania about a week earlier.
The journalist is the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, who, as mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s, was a political mentor to Kremlin chief Vladimir Putin. For a long time she therefore enjoyed more freedom in Russia than other members of the opposition.
At the end of October, however, the commercial manager of Sobchak's media company Attention Media was arrested for alleged extortion. The company operates, among other things, Sobchak's YouTube channel with more than three million subscribers. There, the journalist had repeatedly criticized the Russian attack on Ukraine in recent months. State media reported that Sobchak was also under investigation. On October 26, her country house near Moscow was searched.
On the same day she left Russia and entered the EU country of Lithuania via Belarus. In addition to Russian, Sobchak also has Israeli citizenship and can therefore enter the European Union, although the Baltic states and Poland imposed entry bans on Russians with tourist visas in mid-September.
After Sobchak's departure, the state news agency TASS reported that the police had received an investigator's order to arrest Sobchak, "but they managed to escape." However, the agency later said the allegations against her were dropped.
After her escape, Sobchak had denied the allegations. It was an attempt to put pressure on her media company, she wrote on Telegram. "It is clear that this is an attack on my editorial office, the last free editorial office in Russia that had to be put under pressure." Sobchak's mother Lyudmila Narusova, a long-time senator in the Russian Federation Council, told the state news agency Ria Novosti a few days ago that her daughter would return to Russia "very soon".
In Russian media reports, Sobchak is often referred to as Putin's goddaughter - although she denied it shortly before the presidential election in 2018. In the election, Sobchak ran against incumbent Putin. At the time, observers accused her of allowing herself to be exploited to give the election a semblance of competition.
