A Russian television star and former presidential candidate fled Russia to Lithuania using her Israeli passport this week after her mansion was searched in an extortion case against her media director.
Ksenia Sobchak, 40, who ran for president in 2018, entered Lithuania on an Israeli passport, the Lithuanian State Security Department director Darius Jauniskis told the TASS Russian state news agency on Thursday.
“Yes, I can confirm that Sobchak is in Lithuania,” Jauniskis said.
Sobchak left Russia after her apartment was searched this week by Russian authorities investigating her commercial director Kirill Sukhanov on criminal charges. Sukhanov is in custody on extortion charges, CNN reported.
On Wednesday, Sobchak described the case against Sukhanov as “nonsense” in a Telegram post.
“Our commercial director Kirill Sukhanov has been arrested. They are trying to charge him with extortion,” she wrote, describing the investigation as intimidation against her editorial staff, which she called the “last free editorial office” in the country.
“I don’t believe [these charges] at all, and I hope that now they will quickly sort everything out and will see that all this is some kind of nonsense,” she said. “If not, then it is obviously a raid on my editorial office – the last free editorial office in Russia, which had to be clamped down.”
The TV presenter had previously said that was not free to state her opinion on the Ukraine war, the Telegraph reported.
Sobchak, once linked to opposition parties before running for president in 2018 against Russian President Vladimir Putin during which she was accused of being the Kremlin's spoiler candidate, is rumored to be have been close to Putin. The Russian leader was a mentor to her father Anatoly Sobchak at the beginning of his political career when he was mayor of St. Petersburg, according to CNN.