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A Russian media star with strong ties to Putin fled the country, per multiple reports.
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Ksenia Sobchak, rumored to be Putin’s god-daughter, is in Lithuania, an official there said.
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Sobchak left after her home was searched in connection with a high-profile extortion case.
A prominent journalist rumored to be the god-daughter of President Vladimir Putin has fled Russia, according to multiple reports.
Ksenia Sobchak left Russia and entered Lithuania using an Israeli passport late on Tuesday, state-controlled media outlet TASS reported, citing unnamed law-enforcement officials.
On Wednesday, police searched her Moscow home as part of an extortion case targeting one of her colleagues, TASS said, again citing an anonymous law-enforcement source. The source said there was a warrant for her arrest.
Sobchak sought to confuse police by buying tickets to Dubai and Turkey, before fleeing to Lithuania via Belarus by land late on Tuesday, per the TASS report.
Video circulating on social media, which Insider has been unable to authenticate, appears to show her walking across the Belarus-Lithuanian border accompanied by two men.
Sobchak, who runs the Ostorozhno.Media group, fled after her commercial director Kirill Sukhanov was detained and his house searched.
Follwing Sukhanov’s arrest, she posted to Telegram saying the case is “nonsense” and “another pressure on journalism in the country.”
The former editor of Russian Tatler magazine, Arian Romanovsky, was arrested in the same case, TASS reported.
Russian authorities accused the pair of extortion from the head of defense conglomerate Rostec, TASS reported.
Sobchak, 40, is a prominent TV anchor and socialite who became famous via reality TV shows. She later distanced herself from her image as “Russia’s Paris Hilton” to make a bid for Russia’s presidency .
She is the daughter of Anatoly Sobchak, was the first post-Soviet mayor of St Petersburg in the early 1990s and had Vladimir Putin as a deputy.
Putin has since described Sobchak as a mentor, and Ksenia has long been rumored to be Putin’s god-daughter.
Though she has at times taken a liberal stance and has criticized Putin’s government, her presidential run was cast by some critics as a feint staged to give the impression of competitive elections in Russia.
Putin has clamped down hard on Russian media outlets in the last years, an effort that has, as of the invasion of Ukraine, all but silenced independent journalism in the country.
Lithuanian counterintelligence chief Darius Jauniškis said Sobchak has the right to remain in Lithuania for 90 days, TASS reported.
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