New footage appears to show the moment Vladimir Putin’s estranged "goddaughter" fled to the West to avoid arrest by his draconian law enforcement agencies.
TV star and opposition politician Ksenia Sobchak, 40, is seen crossing by foot the border from Russian satellite state Belarus into Lithuania, an EU and NATO country, at Vidzy frontier point 106 miles north of Minsk.
The extraordinary video was apparently leaked from Belarusian border cameras.
An unknown man is seen carrying her bag and at some point he looks back as if to see they were not being followed.
At one point he evidently warns her to lower her head to avoid being seen by cameras.
She then goes through Belarus passport control at 1.32pm local time on October 26.
She is heard being asked by a male border control officer: “Where are you heading?”
She asks him to repeat the questions and replies: “To Lithuania.”
Sobchak is then seen being accompanied by two uniformed men as she carries her own bag to the actual frontier.
The video was leaked, likely with official sanction, to a Telegram channel called Three Sisters with less than 2,000 subscribers.
It has links to the security apparatus of Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko.
The Belarus authorities made no visible attempts to stop her leaving even though by this point she was - according to Russian sources - wanted as a suspect in connection with a criminal probe in Moscow involving her business associate, an investigation she believes to be politically-motivated but which could have landed her in jail for up to 15 years.
The timing of the Russian state media announcement that she had left Belarus for Lithuania was only 36 minutes after she had been cleared for exit by the Belarus border guard.
Lithuania today confirmed that Putin’s ‘goddaughter’ Ksenia Sobchak had entered the Baltic state using an Israeli passport.
The Director of the State Security Department (VSD) Darius Jauniškis told radio station Zhinyu Radijas she had Israeli citizenship and could enter without a visa and remain for 90 days without a visa.
"So far we do not have intelligence information that she may pose a threat to the Lithuanian state,” he said.
“If there was such information, of course, certain measures would be taken.”
Earlier in the war Sobchak had travelled to Israel and back to Russia but at the time denied reports that she had been issued with an Israeli passport.
Lithuania normally now blocks entry to Russian citizens due to Putin’s war.
Separately, Russian political scientist Sergei Markov claimed that a “high-ranking official” had tipped off Sobchak that she faced arrest.
This led to her fleeing Russia, he said.
This will add to suspicions that Putin had permitted her to flee.
She bought tickets to both Turkey and Dubai to “confuse” state investigators seeking her arrest.
Then she travelled to Belarus by car and left for the West in a “smart operational escape plan in order to avoid arrest” using her Israeli passport.
A socialite-turned-politician, Sobchak was once called the Paris Hilton of Moscow.
She was a popular reality TV presenter and once posed for Playboy.
She hosted the Russian version of Big Brother and went on to stand as a liberal candidate against Putin in the 2018 presidential election - rigged in Putin’s favour - when she came fourth.
One of Russia’s best known faces, she now runs independent media outlets which have angered Putin’s officials.
Putin has known her since her childhood and he attended her baptism in the Orthodox Church, leading to rumours he is her godfather.
Anatoly Sobchak was Putin’s law professor and mentor who later gave the KGB spy his first foothold in politics as his deputy when he served as mayor of St Petersburg.
Later Putin even smuggled Ksenia's father out of Russia for medical treatment in the West at a time when his patron was accused by foes of corruption.
Putin was later pictured at the former mayor’s funeral in 2000, alongside Ksenia, and her mother Lyudmila Narusova, now a Russian senator who opposes the war in Ukraine.
Narusova has voted against war-linked legislation in the Russian parliament and accused his state TV of “shameless lies” over the conflict.
Despite criticising Putin, Ksenia held a private meeting with the Russian leader before announcing she would oppose him in the poll.
This led to claims that she was conspiring with him to give a cloak of respectability to a rigged election.
The close family links have not saved Ksenia Sobchak from harassment by Putin’s police.
She fled dramatically from Russia via Belarus hours after police staged searches at her luxury country home near Moscow.
This was linked to a murky criminal investigation which saw the arrest on Tuesday of her commercial director Kirill Sukhanov, and a former Russian Tatler editor, Arian Romanovsky, on blackmail allegations.
Sobchak was named as a suspect in the same case, namely “extortion to obtain property on a particularly large scale”.
Footage showed the men - who face sentences of up to 15 years - in court.
Had she not fled, Sobchak would also have been brought to court on the same accusation.
Police were reported as seeking to detain Sobchak at a VIP Moscow airport when it was announced she had reached the West by land.
There is no passport control between “union state” Russia and Belarus, which means the Vidzy crossing acted as her exit point from Russia.
Belarus has been used as a transit point by some escapees from Putin’s mobilisation in recent weeks.
