This is the best summary I could come up with:

In 2018, Karin Kneissl, then foreign minister of neutral Austria, made headlines when she invited Putin to her wedding.

It drew widespread criticism, coming just months after some EU countries – excluding Austria – expelled scores of Russian diplomats in response to the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal in Salisbury.

A highly controversial figure in her own country, Kneissl moved to France in September 2020 and became a guest columnist for Russia Today, which is widely viewed as a propaganda arm of the Kremlin.

But Lebanon was only a temporary solution, she said, and she travelled to Russia every six weeks for work, where she is now setting up a thinktank.

In June, Kneissl unveiled the Gorki centre – a thinktank attached to St Petersburg university to operate under her leadership.

The thinktank was set up to “help define the policies for the Russian Federation” with a focus on the Near and Middle East.

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