Kseniya Sobchak

Born in 1981 to Anatoly Sobchak, Saint Petersburg's first democratically elected mayor and one of Vladimir Putin's early political mentors, and Senator Lyudmila Narusova, she grew up between ballet school at the Mariinsky Theatre and the Hermitage Museum's art programme. She studied international relations in Saint Petersburg and later Moscow, but broke through to a national audience as host of the TNT reality show Dom-2. The pivot came when she moved into opposition journalism, anchoring at the independent TV Rain and editing L'Officiel Russia. In 2018 she ran for president as the Civic Initiative's candidate - a long-shot campaign that put her directly opposite the government her father had once helped build. After a brief return to state television co-hosting Dok-Tok on Channel One from 2020 to 2021, she launched Ostorozhno Media, her own independent holding with a network of Telegram channels and the YouTube project "Ostorozhno: Sobchak".