Journalists, artists, members of the opposition are fleeing Russia – and they too: Waldimir Putin’s (69) prominent goddaughter Xenia Sobchak (40)! She left the country for Israel. Her hometowns of Saint Petersburg and Moscow – all of Russia – no longer safe enough for Sobchak!
She is not only Putin’s goddaughter: the former it girl of Moscow society is the daughter of Putin’s political foster father Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St. Petersburg.
Under Father Sobchak, Putin rose rapidly after his return from the dying GDR in the early and mid-1990s. At that time, Putin laid the foundation for the symbiosis of mafia and secret services – the so-called siloviki, with whom he later took over the state and secured and secures billions in assets.
Xenia Sobchak, who at the time moderated a TV show and worked as the head of a lifestyle magazine, had already run against Putin in the 2018 presidential elections – at the time the opposition was still eyeing it with suspicion. After that, she was repeatedly criticized and turned away from the godfather – similar to her mother, who recently criticized Putin sharply.
Now the flight to Israel – also before the new law, which provides for up to 15 years in prison, for “fake news” about what the Kremlin calls “special military operations in Ukraine”. Sobchak called the operations by their names.
Now she has fled, like others: for example, the head of the last independent TV station “Doschd” (rain), Tikhon Dsjadko.
► The film director Kantemir Balagow has also left the country. In his feature film “Beanstalk”, two soldiers traumatized by war struggle unsuccessfully to find their way back to normality after the Second World War.
► Also Alla Pugatchewa, one of the star singers of the USSR and Russia, who sang his “What are wars for?” in 1987 with Udo Lindenberg – gone.
► Also gone: Renata Litwinowa, one of the most famous Russian actresses and directors.
► Out of Russia is also one of the most controversial theater and film directors in Russia, Konstantin Bogomolow.
The correspondent of the Frankfurter Rundschau watched his current Moscow production, set in 2015, and later wrote about the final scene: “In the year 2025 (so it reads on a sign) a government official visits his former lover in the penal colony and brings home-cooked meals from his mother in Kyiv.”
“How did you end up in Ukraine?” asks the moved prisoner. “There is no Ukraine anymore,” is the reply, “it’s all Russia now, except Lviv – we gave that to Poland.”
The performance was on the evening of February 23rd. Hours later, “the special military operation in Ukraine,” as the Kremlin calls it, began.