Ksenia Sobchak, a Russian-Israeli news anchor and the daughter of a politician who mentored President Vladimir Putin, said she "escaped" from Russia in a recent statement.

Sobchak, whose father, Anatoly Sobchak, was a Soviet-era politician who became the first democratically elected mayor of Moscow, received Israeli citizenship earlier this year and recently traveled from Russia to Venice.

Although her father was known as one of Putin's political mentors, Ksenia has become a prominent critic of Putin's and attempted to unseat him in Russia's 2018 presidential election.

Ksenia said in a blog post that, after arriving in Venice, she felt like she had "escaped" from the Soviet Union.

"At such moments, you begin to appreciate trips to Europe. Because you understand that each can be the last. And, of course, all this petty-bourgeois life with cafes and restaurants seems to be from a past life. You feel as if you escaped from the USSR in 1976 and did not see anything," she said, according to the Russian news website Novostivl.

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