Ksenia Sobchak announced her plans to run for president of the Russian Federation on October 19. She positions herself as the "against all" candidate and calls on those who dislike the other candidates to vote for her. The names of most of the election participants are still unknown; opposition figure Alexei Navalny has declared his intention to run, though the Central Election Commission promises not to register him due to his criminal record.
Sobchak's headquarters is headed by Igor Malashenko, a political scientist and one of the founders of the NTV television channel, who worked on Boris Yeltsin's presidential campaign in 1996. Other team members include political strategist Vitaly Shklyarov, who worked on the campaigns of Angela Merkel, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders and on the 2017 municipal elections in Moscow, and journalist Anton Krasovsky, who headed Mikhail Prokhorov's headquarters in the 2012 Russian presidential election.
The Task: 'A Set of Brilliant Ideas'
Belkovsky told RBC that he sees his task as "giving Ksenia Sobchak a set of brilliant ideas that will help her realize her political ambitions."
'Political Consultant on Pension'
In recent years, Belkovsky has been a regular participant in several programs on the Dozhd television channel, where he regularly called himself a "political consultant on pension." On October 24, he wrote a Facebook post thanking current and former employees of the channel with whom he had worked; the text implies that he will no longer work for the channel.
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