Officially, Putin has two children, Maria and Katerina, from his marriage to Lyudmila Putina, the former manager of Aeroflot, whom he divorced in 2013, and who became the first Russian leader to divorce him after Peter the Great in 1698. Putin, who has rarely spoken publicly about his children, answered questions at his 2015 annual press conference, saying his daughters had not left the country as alleged. Maria and Katerina are depicted in Dresden. Photo: American Photo Archive / Alamy “They live in Russia. They have never been trained anywhere except Russia. I’m proud of them. “They continue to study and work,” he said. “My daughters speak three European languages fluently. I never discuss my family with anyone. They were never “star” children, they were never happy with the spotlight on them. “They just live their own lives.” Putin said his daughters “are taking the first steps in their careers” and “are not involved in business or politics.” However, both daughters have since started business. Katerina Tikhonova, 35, the youngest daughter, was born in Dresden in 1986 while Putin worked as a KGB spy. Tikhonova, who uses her grandmother’s surname from her mother, studied at St. Petersburg State University and Moscow State University and has a master’s degree in physics and mathematics. In addition to her studies, Tikhonova has a passion for Japanese culture and rock’n’roll acrobatics, a boogie-woogie sport. In 2013, together with her dancing partner, she was fifth in the world championship in Switzerland. These were shots from her dance competitions, compared to photos from the website of Moscow State University, where she works, that helped to establish for the first time that Tikhonova was Putin’s daughter in 2015. Tikhonova dances with Ivan Klimov during the rock’n’roll acrobatic competition of the World Cup in Krakow in 2014. Photo: Reuters Tikhonova married Kirill Shamalov, the youngest son of Nikolai Shamalov, a close friend of Putin and co-owner of Rossiya Bank, which the US government has described as the “personal bank” of senior Kremlin officials. Kirill was appointed Gazprom’s chief legal officer for foreign economic activity in 2002, when he was just 20 years old. The couple got married in a secret three-day ceremony at the exclusive Igora ski resort in 2013, before photos of the event leaked. They divorced in 2018, but details of any financial settlement have not been made known. Less than two years after his marriage, Shamalov was named one of Russia’s youngest billionaires by Forbes magazine after acquiring 17% of the Sibur petrochemical company from Gennady Timchenko, an ally of Putin who was later sanctioned. A Reuters poll in 2015 estimated the couple had more than $ 2 billion in corporate stakes, as well as a luxury 4 4 million beachfront villa in the French resort of Biarritz. The eight-bedroom Alta Mira villa in the Atlantic resort was breached last month by anti-Putin protesters, who posted a video on social media saying: “This house was bought with money stolen by Putin and the Russian mafia.” They said: “Instead of a luxurious refuge for the Putin-Samalov oligarchs, we decided to organize a place of rehabilitation and life here for the victims of the Putin regime, especially the refugees from Ukraine and Russia who have been forced to flee the war. prisons of repression and torture. Gone are the days when dictators and oligarchs could rob their countries and live carefree in villas in Europe. “ Tikhonova worked in various roles at Moscow State University before, in 2020, she was appointed head of a new $ 1.7 billion Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Systems at the university. Putin has previously described the Innopraktika center as “one of the most essential tools in the national strategy for developing AI technology.” Its official advisers at the university include five members of Putin’s inner circle, including two former KGB officers who lived in the same apartment building where he grew up in Dresden. Putin’s eldest daughter, Maria Vorontsova, 36, is a pediatric endocrinologist who studies the effects of hormones on the body. Maria Vorontsova, photo in 2021. Photo: ITAR-TASS News Agency / Alamy In 2019, Vorontsova, who lives in a penthouse apartment opposite the US embassy in Moscow, gave an interview to Russian state television, revealing plans for a 500 500 million medical project to help treat cancer. Vorontsova married Russian-born Dutch businessman Jorrit Faassen in 2013 and the couple lived in the penthouse of an apartment building in Amsterdam. In 2014, some Dutch neighbors demanded that he be expelled from the country after the downing of MH17 by pro-Russian forces over Ukraine. Recently, a group of Amsterdam residents appealed to Vorontsova to ask her father to end the invasion of Ukraine. A plaque on land belonging to the couple reads: “Less than 2,000 kilometers from the quiet part of your free land, your father is decimating an entire free country and its people. It seems that your old man is difficult to reach and clearly impossible to stop even by his executioners. “But as we all know, dads and daughters are a different story.” Rumors are rife in Russia that Putin has a third, even more secretive, daughter than a year in a relationship with Svetlana Krivonogikh, a Russian woman who allegedly grew up in an overcrowded St. Petersburg apartment and worked as a cleaner. The Pandora Papers have revealed that Krivonogikh, 46, became the owner of the Monaco apartment through an offshore company that reportedly started a few weeks after giving birth to a daughter, Luzia. The Kremlin has rejected a proposal that Louise be the president’s daughter. Putin has said in the past: “I have a private life in which I do not allow interference. It must be respected. “
