Ksenia Sobchak: TV presenter and former presidential candidate fled Russia

CNN
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Russian TV host and presidential candidate 2018 Ksenia Sobchak she has Flee from Russia The official Russian news agency TASS reported Thursday.

Sobchak entered Lithuania using her Israeli passport, according to the director of the country’s Ministry of State Security, Darius Yunskis.

“Yes, I can confirm that Sobchak is in Lithuania,” TASS quoted Juneskes as saying.

Sobchak left the country after it was revealed on Wednesday that her apartment was searched in the framework of the criminal case against her commercial director Kirill Sukhanov, who was arrested on charges of extortion.

“Our commercial director Kirill Sukhanov has been arrested. They are trying to accuse him of extortion,” Sobchak wrote in her Telegram channel on Wednesday.

Sobchak denounced this as “nonsense” and an attack on her editorial team.

“I do not think so [these charges] Absolutely, and I hope that now they will quickly sort everything out and see that all this is some kind of nonsense,” she said. “If not, it was clearly a raid on my editorial office – the last free editorial office in Russia, which had to be clamp down on him.”

Sobchak is a suspect in the case of its director accused of extorting 11 million rubles (about 179,000 dollars) from the head of the state corporation Rostec Sergey Chemezov, a source in the law enforcement agency told TASS.

His lawyer, Svetlana Lipatova, said on Wednesday that the defense plans to appeal Sukhanov’s arrest.

Born and raised in Saint Petersburg, Sobchak has close relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was mentored by her father, the late reformist politician Anatoly Sobchak at the beginning of his political career.

In 2010, Ksenia Sobchak repeatedly participated in protests and opposition rallies, but lost support from opposition figures after her candidacy for the Russian presidency in 2018.

Her decision to run for president was met with widespread criticism from Russian opposition leaders, including Alexei Navalny, who accused her campaign of deception and called it the “Kremlin project”.