Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow) reported that Stanislav Belkovsky would take the post of chief political consultant to Ksenia Sobchak's headquarters, citing campaign head Igor Malashenko. Belkovsky confirmed to RBC that he received the offer to advise Sobchak from Malashenko "today at 11:30 a.m. Moscow time in a cafe on Malaya Bronnaya Street."
According to the political analyst, he has known Sobchak for a long time, though not very closely, and considers her a person with political ambitions. "She is a person with political ambitions who, in my purely personal opinion, wants to become president," Belkovsky told RBC. He also suggested that Sobchak intends to seriously contend for the presidency in 2024, and that the current campaign is an opportunity to test her strength. "My task is to give Ksenia Sobchak a set of brilliant ideas that will help her realize her political ambitions," he explained. He declined to say which ideas he intended to propose, explaining that he first had to coordinate them with Sobchak.
Ksenia Sobchak announced her decision to run in the Russian presidential election on October 18. She stated that voting for her would effectively mean the return of the "against all" option to the ballot. "My participation in the elections on the positions described above is beneficial to voters and useful for the Russian political system," she said. In an interview with The Guardian, Sobchak noted that she has no political program because she does not yet have political weight. Later, RBC found out that the economic program for Sobchak would be prepared by Vladislav Inozemtsev, director of the Center for Post-Industrial Studies.
The head of Sobchak's election headquarters is political analyst Igor Malashenko, who previously worked in Boris Yeltsin's campaign staff. In addition to Inozemtsev and Malashenko, the campaign is advised by political strategist Vitaly Shklyarov, who has worked with the campaigns of Angela Merkel, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, and former State Duma deputy Dmitry Gudkov. According to Shklyarov, Sobchak invited him to "work with young people"—the part of "people, girls, boys who watched 'Dom-2'," as Shklyarov described the target audience. The headquarters has not yet set specific tasks for him, he added.
Stanislav Belkovsky is a political strategist and publicist, founder and former director of the Institute for National Strategy. He works as a political consultant, having advised, in particular, Boris Berezovsky and Yulia Tymoshenko. He is the author of the reports "State and Oligarchy," "The Loneliness of Putin," "The Loneliness of Putin—2," and others. Since 2014, he has worked for the TV channel Dozhd (Rain).
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