Under Putin’s Roof

On May 9 last year, Karin Kneissl stood in front of a Russian war memorial. The residents of the small village of Giblitsy had laid large bouquets of tulips and roses at its base. They had even erected a Soviet star made of artificial flowers in white, red and blue. It was taller than the little boy posing beside it in a Red Army uniform.

As they do everywhere in Russia, people here in the countryside, a few hundred kilometres southeast of Moscow, were commemorating the victory over Nazi Germany in what Russians call the “Great Patriotic War,” 80 years earlier. Afterwards, some of them posed for a group photograph in front of the memorial. And right there in the middle: Karin Kneissl, Austria’s former foreign minister.

Kneissl now lives in this village in the Russian provinces. Just behind the memorial stands her compact green wooden house with its veranda. Since moving in, she has even bought an additional plot of land, where she has had a stable and an enclosure built for her miniature ponies, Sumsum and Daphne.

The two animals became internationally known in September 2023. When Kneissl relocated, a Russian military aircraft, an Ilyushin plane normally used to transport tanks and soldiers, flew the ponies to Russia. By that point at the latest, it was clear that Karin Kneissl, who entered Sebastian Kurz’s first coalition government in 2017 on an FPÖ ticket, had switched sides.

You can see as much on the website of her own Institute for Geopolitics at St. Petersburg University. One of its stated tasks is to help develop solutions for “the political goals of the Russian Federation.” Kneissl is also on the payroll of several state broadcasters and was personally appointed by Vladimir Putin as an ambassador for the Amur tiger. In all of these roles, she spreads Kremlin propaganda.