Putin-Linked Celebrity Journalist Sobchak Flees Russia

(Bloomberg) -- The celebrity-journalist daughter of President Vladimir Putin’s political mentor fled Russia for Europe as police detained a close associate and raided her home as part of a criminal case for alleged extortion.

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Ksenia Sobchak, 40, a socialite and TV presenter who has publicly questioned the invasion of Ukraine, is in Lithuania, authorities in the Baltic nation said Thursday. In her Telegram channel, she called the investigation an attack on her online media outlet. She didn’t respond to a request for comment from Bloomberg.

Sobchak, who took part in anti-Kremlin protests that erupted before the 2012 presidential election, ran in the 2018 race against Putin but got less than 2% of the vote. The opposition branded her participation as a ploy by the Russian leadership to give the appearance of democracy after officials barred Putin’s top opponent from contesting the vote.

Putin has often described her father, Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St. Peterburg and democratic reformer, as a major influence on him when they worked together in the 1990s after the Soviet Union’s collapse.

Ksenia Sobchak denounced the arrest of her media company’s commercial director, Kirill Sukhanov, who’s been placed in pre-trial detention. Police also charged the former editor of the Russian edition of Tatler with embezzlement after a complaint by Sergey Chemezov, an ally of Putin who heads a state industrial holding, according to state media.

Police raided Sobchak’s home outside Moscow Tuesday as part of the investigation and have issued a warrant for her arrest, Tass reported.

The TV star, who’s done hard-hitting interviews about issues such as prison abuse, ran into legal difficulties with the authorities during the protests a decade ago when she was romantically involved with a top anti-Putin activist. Police raided her apartment in Moscow and confiscated 1.5 million euros though they later returned her the money. Still, she was careful to avoid direct criticism of the Russian leader.

“Putin’s shadow was permanently above her,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, an expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Sobchak projected herself as a liberal under a tacit agreement with the authorities but now they don’t need people like her any more and she could lose her immunity.”

(An earlier version of this article was corrected to reflect the status of her relationship with an anti-Putin activist.)

--With assistance from Milda Seputyte.

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