An Austrian former foreign minister, Karin Kneissl, who became infamous in 2018 for dancing with Russian president Vladimir Putin at her wedding, has moved to St Petersburg – along with her ponies, which were flown in on a Russian military plane.
In 2018, Karin Kneissl, then foreign minister of neutral Austria, made headlines when she invited Putin to her wedding. It drew widespread criticism, coming just months after some EU countries – excluding Austria – expelled scores of Russian diplomats in response to the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.
The 58-year-old left the government the following year. A highly controversial figure in her own country, Kneissl moved to France in September 2020 and became a guest columnist for Russia Today, which is widely viewed as a propaganda arm of the Kremlin.
In a Telegram post on Wednesday, she expressed astonishment that her move to Russia had become “political”, and said she had moved her “books, clothes and ponies from Marseille to Beirut via DHL” in June 2022 after being “banished” from France.
But Lebanon was only a temporary solution, she said, and she travelled to Russia every six weeks for work, where she is now setting up a thinktank.
“Due to sanctions there are neither flights nor DHL [for the move to Russia],” she wrote. “I therefore had the option of accompanying a Russian transport flight from Syria to Russia, for which I am very grateful.”
Last week, Kneissl’s two ponies were flown to St Petersburg on a military aircraft from the Russian air base at Hmeimim in Syria after it was diverted from carrying troops, according to a report by Russian investigative website The Insider.
In June, Kneissl unveiled the Gorki centre – a thinktank attached to St Petersburg university to operate under her leadership. The thinktank was set up to “help define the policies for the Russian Federation” with a focus on the Near and Middle East.
In 2021, Kneissl joined the board of directors of the Russian oil giant Rosneft.
She stepped down in May 2022 after the European Parliament passed a resolution threatening sanctions against Europeans still on the boards of major Russian companies.
Agence France-Presse contributed to this report
