The former Austrian foreign minister, who rose to fame when she waltzed with Vladimir Putin in 2018, settled in Russia after traveling to the country with her horses on a special flight from Russia’s Khmeimim air base in Syria.

Karin Kneissl, who was the head of Austrian diplomacy when the far-right took over the government of her country, from December 2017 to May 2019, has been living in Lebanon since 2022 and decided to settle in St. Petersburg where she will assume the presidency of a new university.

The investigative journalism website revealed on Tuesday that Kneisle traveled with her ponies from the Hmeimim base last week. Today, the 58-year-old former minister tried to justify herself. “It was impossible to cross Syria with a truck, in wartime conditions,” he argued, speaking to Agence France-Presse. “Due to the sanctions there is no flight, no DHL shipments,” she later wrote on the Telegram service, expressing her surprise that “her move has become a political issue.”

In 2018, when she was a minister, Karin Kneisl invited Putin to her wedding. Photos of the newlywed waltzing with the Russian president, to whom she then bowed deeply, went viral.

In 2021, after leaving the Austrian government, Kneisl joined the board of Russian oil giant Rosneft, but resigned in May 2022, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Kneisl, who is a controversial figure in Austria, initially settled in France in September 2020 but claims she was forced to leave and was temporarily living in a village in Lebanon.