Russian TV presenter and 2018 presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak has fled Russia for Lithuania, Russian state news agency TASS reported on Thursday.
Sobchack entered Lithuania using her Israeli passport, according to the director of the country’s Department of State Security Darius Jauniskis.
“Yes, I can confirm that Sobchak is in Lithuania,” Jauniskis was quoted as saying by TASS.
Sobchak fled the country after it was revealed on Wednesday that her apartment had been searched as part of the criminal case against her commercial director Kirill Sukhanov, who was detained on charges of extortion.
“Our commercial director Kirill Sukhanov was arrested. They are trying to accuse him of blackmail,” Sobchak wrote on her Telegram channel on Wednesday.
Sobchak denounced this as “nonsense” and an attack on her editorial team.
“I do not believe [these charges] not at all, and I hope that now they will quickly sort everything out and see that all this is some kind of nonsense,” he said. “If not, then it is obviously a raid on my editorial office – the last free editorial office in Russia, which had to be abolished.”
Sobchak is a suspect in the case of her manager who is accused of extorting 11 million rubles (about $179,000) from the head of state-owned company Rostec Sergei Chemezov, a law enforcement agency source told TASS.
The defense plans to appeal Sukhanov’s detention, his lawyer Svetlana Lipatova said Wednesday.
Born and raised in St. Petersburg, Sobchak has close ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was mentored by her late father, reformist politician Anatoly Sobchak, early in his political career.
In the 2010s, Ksenia Sobchak frequently attended opposition demonstrations and rallies, but lost support from opposition figures after her candidacy for the Russian presidency in 2018.
Her decision to run for president was widely criticized by Russian opposition leaders, including Alexey Navalny, who accused her campaign of fraud and called it a “Kremlin program”.
