Kneissl said in her post that she moved her “books, clothes and ponies from Marseille to Beirut” in June 2022, after Russia invaded Ukraine, after which she says she was “banished” from France.
At the Eastern Economic Forum in the far eastern Russian city of Vladivostok earlier this week, Kneissl told Russian state news agency Tass that she had set up the Gorki centre — a think tank associated with the state university in St. Petersburg.
Because the think tank requires a lot of her time, she decided to move to Russia, she said.
The Gorki centre, Kneissl told Tass, “deals, among other things, with issues of energy, migration and new alliances — issues in which I am well versed, which also affect the Arab and Islamic world, with which I am familiar.”
Kneissl also said on Telegram that “since apparently nothing is going on in Austria and Germany beyond the economic crisis, my relocation is becoming a political issue.” She added, in a swipe likely at her critics, that “the hatred that seeps out of Austria amazes not only me.”
In an interview at the forum with Russian news agency RIA Novosti, Kneissl said, “It’s not easy to move to Russia” because of the amount of paperwork involved but that she had already moved into an apartment she is renting in St. Petersburg.
