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Karin Kneissl is dancing with Kremlin boss Vladimir Putin at their wedding in 2018
Photo: Alexei Druzhinin / ZUMA Press / imago images
The former Austrian Foreign Minister Karin Kneissl is expanding her activities in Russia: After writing for the state media group RT as an author since last year, she will now be a member of the supervisory board of the state oil company Rosneft.
Kneissl was nominated for one of the seats on the committee.
This emerges from a decree issued by Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin on February 26 this year, which the government has now published.
In addition to Kneissl, the government also nominated ex-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder again.
He has been head of the Rosneft Supervisory Board since 2017.
In addition, Matthias Warnig, former Stasi agent and head of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, is again listed as a candidate.
Rosneft had sales of around 80 billion euros in 2019 and is one of the largest employers in the country with around 330,000 employees.
The group is closely interwoven with the Kremlin.
Like Putin, the powerful company boss Igor Sechin comes from what is now Saint Petersburg.
In the 1990s, Sechin was Putin's right-hand man in the office for external contacts of the local city administration before they both moved to Moscow.
Curtsey to Putin
The 56-year-old Kneissl was Austria's Foreign Minister from 2017 to 2019.
The non-party was nominated by the right-wing populist FPÖ.
The Ibiza affair of the then FPÖ boss Heinz-Christian Strache led to the break of the governing coalition of ÖVP and FPÖ at the end of May 2019, Kneissl left politics.
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Karin Kneissl with Russian Foreign Minister Sergej Lavrov
Photo: Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
A year later, in May 2020, it was announced that she is now working as a guest writer for the Russian state broadcaster Russia Today.
Kneissl is said to have good relations with Moscow.
Russian President Vladimir Putin appeared as a guest of honor at her wedding in southern Styria in the summer of 2018 and danced with her.
The pictures caused controversial discussions, also because Kneissl curtseyed to Putin at the end of the dance.
The then foreign minister defended herself: "The Russian President bowed beforehand, and I answered this bow with a curtsey." There could be no question of submission.
On Wednesday, Kneissl did not want to comment on her nomination for the Rosneft supervisory board.
"I don't give interviews," she told the APA news agency
.
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