Vladimir Putin’s "goddaughter" has dramatically "returned to Russia" 12 days after fleeing on foot to the West to avoid arrest and potential jail.
TV star and opposition politician and socialite Ksenia Sobchak, 40, was reported by Moscow state media to have returned.
Ms Sobchak fled after her luxury home near Moscow was searched as part of a criminal case that also saw the arrest of her business partner.
She was also at the time reported as being a suspect in the extortion case, with fears she could be jailed for up to 15 years.
Now she is seen as a witness rather than a suspect, and that change may have prompted her return.
Putin has known Ms Sobchak since her childhood and attended her Orthodox baptism, prompting claims he is her godfather and some believe he intervened in the case.
She remained largely quiet since reaching the West, crossing from authoritarian Belarus to Lithuania, except for a message that said: "Yes, I am in trouble. Possibly, in big trouble.”
Her mother Lyudmila Narusova, a senator, was quoted by a state-run Moscow news agency last week, answering whether Ksenia would return to Russia by saying: “She will, very soon.”
Now Narusova has refused to comment on whether her daughter has come back.
Russian state media said that unnamed eyewitnesses have seen Ms Sobchak return to Russia with her husband Konstantin Bogomolov.
She is believed to have crossed from the NATO state Latvia into the Pskov region of Russia at the Burachki crossing.
A socialite-turned-politician, Ms Sobchak was once dubbed the Paris Hilton of Moscow.
She was a popular reality TV presenter and posed for Playboy along with other men’s titles.
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.
People were suspicious of her rush to Lithuania amid suspicions she was tipped off by a senior Russian official of moves to arrest her.
As she left the country, Ms Sobchak was named as a suspect in the same case, as well as her associate Kirill Sukhanov and a former Russian Tatler editor Arian Romanovsky.
The pair face accusations of “extortion to obtain property on a particularly large scale”.
Ms Sobchak had dismissed Mr Sukhanov’s detention as “laughable nonsense.”
