Skip to navigationSkip to contentSkip to footerHelp using this website - Accessibility statement
Advertisement

Vladimir Putin, family man: why nothing is secret any more

As Western nations place sanctions on family members and people close to the Russian leader, they are lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding his private life.

Jason Horowitz

Subscribe to gift this article

Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.

Subscribe now

Already a subscriber?

Vladimir Putin did not like the prying.

It was 2008, and the Russian president, then 56 and eight years into his tightening grip on power, stood for a news conference in Sardinia’s lavish Villa Certosa. At his side was his closest ally in western Europe, Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul and Italian prime minister of hedonist appetites with whom he shared a taste for raunchy jokes, over-the-top furnishings and vast wealth.

When Putin decided to invade Ukraine, he opened the door to his secretive family network. David Rowe

During the summers, Putin’s two teenage daughters had the run of the sprawling villa, going on secret luxury shopping and boating excursions under strict orders that their identities remain concealed and their faces hidden from cameras, says a person with knowledge of the arrangement.

That strategy of strictly shielding his family worked well for Putin over the years, until Russia attacked Ukraine in February. Now, as nations impose sanctions on those closest to him – including those approved last Friday by Britain on the woman long considered to be his mistress, Alina Kabaeva, and his former wife, Lyudmila Ocheretnaya – the facade is beginning to crumble, shedding new light on the Russian leader’s private life.

Some of the first glimmers of his complicated family affairs unfolded in that scene at the villa, as a Russian reporter, Nataliya Melikova of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, gingerly broached the forbidden zone. Days before, a report in Moskovsky Korrespondent said Putin and his wife of 25 years had secretly split. The newspaper further reported he had fallen for Kabaeva, an Olympic gold medallist in rhythmic gymnastics, who, at 24, was about the age of his daughters and had become a public face of his political party.

“I have always reacted negatively to those who, with their snotty noses and erotic fantasies, meddle in other people’s lives,” Putin said, denying the report. Berlusconi mimed shooting Melikova with an imaginary machine gun as Putin, who by then had been accused of murdering several journalists, nodded and smiled. Days later, Moskovsky Korrespondent halted operations for “financial reasons”.

Putin is more than just a protective father who, as he has said, wanted to give his daughters a normal life and considered their safety a matter of national security. A former KGB operative steeped in the agency’s ways of subterfuge, disinformation, and the ability to present different selves depending on the situation, he has shrouded his personal life in secrecy and wrapped it in rumour.

‘The fog of Putin’

He has two officially recognised daughters from his first marriage, but independent Russian news outlets and unverified international news reports say he may have four more children with two other women.

Advertisement

Yet even his acknowledged daughters, now approaching middle age, are so hidden as to be unrecognisable in Moscow. His former wife, whom some biographers believe he married to improve his chances of entering the bachelor-resistant KGB, essentially vanished from view even before they divorced.

In the villa-dotted Russian enclaves of Switzerland, a petition began in March demanding the repatriation of his supposed paramour, Kabaeva, angrily comparing her with Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun.

In Lugano, locals whisper about the green glass building that Kabaeva lived in overlooking the lake and speak with confidence about the hospital where her rumoured children were born and the schools they attended. But they have not seen her.

The supposed children are unverified and invisible. In a Monte Carlo luxury apartment building, residents shrug at pictures of another possible girlfriend and child of Putin’s who owned property there, and whose family shares addresses with Kabaeva’s family in exclusive Moscow luxury buildings. In many cases, they are apparitions, and as in many ghost stories, the phantoms can seem conjured for a desired effect, either by critics to undercut Putin’s self-made image as a protector of family values or by supporters to compound the image of Putin’s wealth, virility, and mysteriousness. Or maybe they are simply real.

“There’s so many stories. All of them can be true or none of them can be true. And that’s sort of the fog of Putin,” says Nina Khrushcheva, a Moscow-born professor of international affairs at the New School in New York. Putin, she says, was at once both obsessively clandestine and an exhibitionist who fed off the Western depiction of him as a supervillain.

Putin in 1985 with his wife at the time, Lyudmila, and their daughter Katya. Getty

The great-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushcheva says that Putin had a Byzantine worldview typical of the Kremlin, and like Stalin, he embraced and perpetuated mythology peppered with truth. “You create misinformation,” she says. “You create an atmosphere of something that everybody is guessing and everybody is discussing and everything is secret.”

Some things do seem clear enough, though. Members of Putin’s family circle are beneficiaries of a kleptocratic system that Putin rules over like a mafia don, with oligarch lieutenants paying him tribute in the form of wealth, lucrative jobs or luxurious villas lavished on his family and those in the potential orbit of his affection.

For decades, few succeeded in penetrating the opaque protective bubble built around them and their resources, but Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has changed that.

In April, the US aimed into the fog and imposed sanctions on his two daughters, citing them as family members of a penalised person – Putin – and asserting their support for the Russian defence industry and reception of billions of dollars of funds directly overseen by Putin.

Advertisement

The US government also nearly placed sanctions on Kabaeva, but pulled back at the last moment to avoid, for now, an escalation, officials said.

Sanctions experts say those measures were less meant to do Putin concrete financial harm than to send him a message that his aggression had crossed a line, and that his invisible and untouchable private world could be seen and reached by the West.

“Overall, sanctions that are not approved by the UN Security Council are bad, most importantly, they are useless,” says Dmitri Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, when asked for comment on the Western sanctions against Putin’s family members. “Sanctions against families, relatives, acquaintances, and journalists are stupid.” Asked whether the Kremlin believes sanctions against Kabaeva and her relatives were a personal affront against Putin, Peskov adds, “This is just an absurd decision!”

The Dutch branch

On a grassy plot of land on the outskirts of Amsterdam, protesters recently sent a message to Putin through his daughter, Maria. Near Ukrainian flags planted in the middle of a heart made of candles, a sign addressed to “Ave Maria Putin” read: “It seems your old man is hard to reach and clearly impossible to stop even by his hangmen. But as we all know, fathers and daughters are a different story,” and, “We beg you, Maria.”

What at first seemed an unlikely place for an appeal – and an unlikely person to appeal to – made more sense when one understood that the land had recently been bought by Jorrit Faassen, a Dutch man who was once married to and has at least one child with Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, as Putin’s eldest daughter is known. In the 15 years since Vorontsova secretly began living with Faassen in the Netherlands, she had at times become the focus of local ire against her authoritarian father.

Things grew particularly tense in 2014, after Russia-backed separatists shot down a Malaysia Airlines jet departing from Amsterdam over Ukraine, killing 298 people, including nearly 200 Dutch. Mayors throughout the Netherlands demanded Vorontsova be deported, and scrutiny has increased with the current war in Ukraine.

Putin’s eldest daughter Maria Vorontsova is among Russians facing international sanctions. 

A Dutch investigative news outlet, Follow the Money, reached Faassen in Russia recently. He called the war in Ukraine an inconvenience and denied that he had been the husband of Vorontsova. “He was not at ease,” says Harry Lensink, the editor who interviewed him.

Since then, the reporters have been ill at ease, too, and worried about their phones being tapped. A contributor to their article about Faassen received notice that a person using a server in Moscow had tried to hack his email account.

Advertisement

All of that anger and anxiety was far removed from the revelry at a party celebrating the couple in 2008 in Wassenaar, perhaps the most exclusive and wealthy area in all the Netherlands. “It was a wedding party,” recalls Danny Plezier, a local folk song singer who performed at the affair.

He says the guests sang along with his hits, and he shook hands with the groom, whom he had known for years, and his new bride. Plezier said he had no idea she was Putin’s daughter and left after his set.

Hardly anyone at the wedding knew much about her, although pals of Faassen, who moved to Moscow for business in 2006, gave clues in their rowdy speeches. They joked about their pastime of hitting on rich Russian girls in Moscow clubs.

Maria’s parents did not attend her Dutch wedding party. Some Russians did, however, including fit men who watched from the bar as a relative of the bride – a young woman who sang a touching, traditional Russian song – danced emphatically to tango music.

The groom’s cousin, Casper Faassen, a prominent Dutch artist, says the next time he saw his cousin’s wife, Maria, was at his aunt’s birthday party in the nearby town of Merenwijk. As guests angled for Indonesian food at the buffet, he says, Maria seemed composed but apart, standing with perfect, dancerlike posture. She communicated with everyone, including her husband, in good English and spoke little Dutch.

The couple eventually ordered some of Casper Faassen’s art pieces. He recalled delivering three blurred images of ballerinas against a gold-leaf background to their apartment above the local Albert Heijn supermarket in nearby Voorschoten. Maria answered the door as her husband loafed on the couch in front of the television. As he came in, Casper Faassen joked about his cousin being a couch potato, and recalled that Maria rolled her eyes in solidarity.

Neither Casper Faassen nor many others in the family knew the true identity of the woman who went as Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, and now Maria Faassen, but Masha to her father. But in 2010, a Russian news outlet, New Times, reported that Jorrit Faassen, then an official at a Russian consultancy firm, received a beating from the bodyguards of Matvey Urin, a top Russian banker who did not know who he was dealing with, after a road rage episode in Moscow.

Urin promptly lost licences to operate banks and the bodyguards ended up in jail. Russian gossip reporters speculated that the Dutchman was Putin’s son-in-law, although Jorrit Faassen always denied it.

The couple spent much of their time in Moscow, where documents listed him as an official at Gazprombank. Casper Faassen said his cousin once offered him the potential of lucrative connections and sales in Russia. But by then, the rumours of Maria’s parentage had begun to circulate and the artist, who reviled Putin for his undercutting of democracy and violent crackdowns, demurred.

“I said, ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ ” he says, and steered clear of the couple from then on.

Advertisement

But local residents paid more attention to them. On a recent afternoon around the luxury high-rise where Jorrit Faassen bought the top two floors, one Ukrainian neighbour expresses disgust at the former inhabitants while Corien Zoetemelk, 57, who lives across the street from the penthouse condo, recalls seeing the couple at various times, including gliding along the canal underneath their apartment building.

They can get you for this!

“I saw them on their sloop,” she says. “She was pregnant.”

On the second-floor balcony of their building next to the canal, an older man says that he “was on the elevator with her once”, and that “she looked like her father”. The man says the couple also have a son, or at least people had seen Jorrit Faassen, who avoided contact with his neighbours, with a little boy. The man on the balcony stops talking when his wife angrily calls him into the apartment. “They can get you for this,” she hisses.

Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and a close – and fabulously enriched – friend of Putin, now on the US and EU sanctions lists, and Vorontsov’s godfather, once told an interviewer she had a son in 2012. In a 2017 interview with Oliver Stone, Putin acknowledged he had become a grandfather.

Some locals are convinced that they saw the Russian grandfather visit.

“I did see Putin,” says Patricia Kortekaas, 62, a member of Voorschoten’s City Council, as she stood outside the supermarket he had supposedly entered. She recalls seeing him, flanked by security, in the coffee and tea aisle.

“He looked cautious,” she says. “I thought, ‘What’s wrong with him?’” (Putin’s office has denied the visits).

By 2014, Vorontsov had become a specialist in pediatric dwarfism. Her charity project, Elfa-Endo, which helps children with endocrine problems, also received funding from the powerful – and now under sanction – Alfa Bank. That could be the reason the US Treasury decided to punish her for leading “state-funded programs that have received billions of dollars from the Kremlin toward genetics research and are personally overseen by Mr Putin”.

Those sanctions could hurt her new family. According to a report published in April by the independent Russian news outlet Meduza, she had by then divorced Jorrit Faassen and remarried a Russian man who got a job at the gas company Novatek. A powerful oligarch, Gennady Timchenko, who often pops up as Putin’s family fixer, and who is also on sanctions lists, recently sat on Novatek’s board.

Advertisement

Vorontsov could not be reached for comment. Faassen did not return a request for comment left with his father, who said, “Go away”, at his home, where the windows, traditionally uncovered in Holland, were blocked with newspaper.

The ‘disciplined’ daughter

From the beginning, Putin’s personal story seemed filled with the stuff of myth-making. He used an official biography – published in 2001, when he first took power as an apparent next-generation democrat – to burnish his image as a tough but heroic family man. In it, he tells the story of personally saving the family, while naked, when a faulty sauna burned down the family dacha.

“The girls suffered the most from the incident,” Putin said of his two daughters. “They had brought all their treasures from home to the dacha – all their toys and Barbie dolls, which they had been accumulating their whole lives. Masha told me later that she couldn’t sleep for several months after that. They had lost everything that was familiar to them.”

Now, the conflagration of Putin’s war in Ukraine has threatened to strip them of everything again. That goes, too, for his second daughter, Katya, who, as Putin tells it, “turned out to be the most disciplined”.

“When I shouted, ‘Everybody get out of the house!’ ” he says, “she dropped her spoon on the table and leaped out of the house without asking any questions”.

A Kremlin-released photo of Putin with family on a beach in Primorsky Krai in 2002. 

Indeed, Katya, who lived under the alias Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova, seems to be the one who has adhered more to Putin’s circle of influence.

In February 2013, she reportedly married Kirill Shamalov, the son of Nikolai Shamalov, a close associate of Putin’s and major shareholder of the Bank Rossiya. One of Putin’s preferred ski resorts, Igora, provided an idyllic winter setting, with the names Kirill and Katerina written in the snow.

In 2020, Meduza and another independent Russian news outlet, Important Stories, obtained emailed wedding invites that Kirill Shamalov sent to Vorontsov, Faassen and their son in Holland. The wedding was said to have indoor ice skating, a laser lighting display and a faux Russian village with assorted performances.

Advertisement

Tikhonova was herself a seasoned performer who had become passionate about acrobatic rock ‘n’ roll dancing. In 2013, she and her dance partner, Ivan Klimov, who flipped her through the air as she wore a leotard and white sneakers, performed at the Boogie-Woogie World Masters of acrobatic rock.

“Everyone knew she was Putin’s daughter,” says Edilio Pagano, who often judged the events in which Tikhonova competed, adding he never felt pressure to give her higher scores.

He says that Tikhonova “was not, shall we say, a brilliant athlete, but she really cared, in that she was present at every competition”. She never spoke of her lineage, he says, but was a “very reserved, very kind, smiley, and well-mannered” woman who communicated mainly in English.

Liaison to the business sector

Around 2014, Pagano worked with her on the executive committee of the World Rock ‘n’ Roll Confederation, based in Switzerland, where she was the vice president for expansion and marketing. She rarely attended meetings, he says, but when she did, she was always accompanied by two bodyguards.

By then, she was busy with bigger business. In 2015, the Russian news agency RBC reported that she had gone to Switzerland not for a dance competition, but to attend the “Russian session” of the Davos Forum with Shamalov.

Putin let slip in a 2011 Russian television interview that Tikhonova majored in Oriental studies at St Petersburg University. But as she stepped gingerly into view in 2015, it was as the author of a math textbook and a half-dozen scientific papers, including one on space travel and how the body reacts to zero gravity. Her co-author, the rector of Moscow State University, Viktor Sadovnichy, did not return a request for comment.

Yet she was more than an academic. Tikhonova headed a research institute, Innopraktika, to sponsor and support young scientists, that was partly financed by the state oil company Rosneft. The board of Innopraktika, Reuters found, had a host of Putin confidants and former KGB officials, including some who lived in the same apartment complex in Dresden, Germany, when the Putin family was stationed there in the 1980s. And by 2014, she helped oversee the $US1.7 billion expansion of Moscow State University, working as a liaison to the business sector with the title of vice rector.

As she grew professionally, so did her husband’s wealth. Kirill Shamalov acquired from Timchenko a roughly $US3 billion stake in Russia’s leading oil and petrochemical company and became one of its top shareholders. The couple also acquired from Timchenko, for an undisclosed price, a seaside villa in Biarritz, France. (In March, Russian activists broke into that villa and tried to make it available to Ukrainian refugees).

In 2018, Tikhonova appeared on a Russian television show, which identified her as the “director of Innopraktika and deputy director of the Institute of Mathematical Study of Complex Systems at Moscow State University.” In the segment, she spoke in front of a computer graphic of a head wired to electrodes. (The US Treasury Department placed sanctions on her for being “a tech executive whose work” supports the Russian government “and defence industry”).

Advertisement

That year, Bloomberg said the couple had divorced and shared nearly $US2 billion in assets. The US placed sanctions on Shamalov, identifying him as the “former husband” of Tikhonova. Her true love still seemed to be dance. In 2019, she became a council member of Russia’s World Dance Sport Federation.

But Miriam Kerpan IIzak, the president of the World Rock ‘N’ Roll Confederation, said Tikhonova was no longer associated with the group. “I don’t have any contact with her,” she says, adding, “She’s not active any more.”

The other women in Putin’s life

Putin’s war has also forced other children linked to him to pull back from their preferred public activities.

Elizaveta Vladimirovna Krivonogikh, whose patronymic means she is the daughter of a Vladimir, is a 19-year-old who played up her possible connection to Putin to gain tens of thousands of followers on her Instagram account, filled with pictures of her coyly hiding her face.

In interviews, Luiza, as she is known, acknowledged she looked a lot like Putin and said that if the president stood before her, she would ask him, “Why?” But the war brought angry attention and her account suddenly disappeared.

Luiza Krivonogikh is the daughter of Svetlana Krivonogikh, 47, a former cleaning woman in St Petersburg, who, through an alleged relationship with Putin, turned into a real estate baroness, a board member of Putin’s personal Bank Rossiya and a major stakeholder in the Igora ski resort where Putin’s second daughter was married.

In 2021, the release of the Pandora Papers – millions of leaked documents from offshore financial firms – and an earlier investigation by Proekt, which was subsequently banned in Russia, showed that Svetlana Krivonogikh’s worth was estimated to be about €100 million ($150 million), and included a $US3.75 million ($5.3 million) Monaco apartment.

Maria Pevchikh, head of investigations at the Anti-Corruption Foundation, a Russian non-profit organisation founded by Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny, was certain that Putin had fathered children with his mistresses and that they had lived in luxury abroad.

She pointed to paper trails that indicated extravagant wealth for the women and their families and to property records showing that a Gazprom subsidiary gave luxurious apartments in the same Moscow building to the mothers of Kabaeva and Luiza Krivonogikh.

Advertisement

On a recent afternoon, as Russians climbed into exclusive sports cars in front of Monte Carlo’s landmark casino, residents of the apartment building there said they had never seen either Svetlana Krivonogikh or her daughter. The doorman said she did not live there.

On April 22, Putin’s supposedly current mistress – and by some accounts, his new wife, Kabaeva – appeared in Moscow at her annual Alina Festival, a patriotic gymnastics event. An advisory member of the National Media Group, controlled by the powerful oligarch Yuri Kovalchuk, she rallied support for the invasion of Ukraine in front of the “Z” signs that are symbols of Putin’s war.

The Swiss and international news media have often reported as a given that Kabaeva, who was living in Switzerland, had Putin’s child at the Sant’Anna clinic near Lugano in 2015, when he disappeared for eight days. (“Doesn’t correspond to reality,” Peskov said at the time).

Alina Kabaeva, pictured with Putin in 2005, is supposedly the Russian President’s current mistress. 

The Lugano clinic, its pristine lobby filled on a recent afternoon with pregnant women speaking Russian, declined to comment. A 2019 report in a Russian newspaper saying that Kabaeva had given birth to twins vanished from the web.

Around Lugano, residents are certain that she had once lived under heavy guard in the glass luxury building overlooking the lake in Lugano’s Paradiso neighbourhood.

“I know she lived here,” says Olena Utkina, a Ukrainian woman who works in a beauty salon down the block. Some are so certain that Kabaeva lived there that they have sought to kick her out, circulating a petition demanding that Switzerland “take action and reunite Alina ‘Eva Braun’ Kabaeva with her ‘Führer’ “.

But the doorman at the building said he had worked there for 10 years and had never seen anyone by that name. No one in the cafes of the Collina d’Oro, a fabulously wealthy area popular with the city’s Russian enclave, had ever seen her. And the couple’s reported children have never publicly materialised.

“They have never been here,” says Bill Eichner, a director at the exclusive American school in Switzerland, where an application for a new Russian student, to be vetted against the growing sanctions list, sat on his desk.

None of the faithful at the nearby Russian Orthodox Church say they have ever seen Kabaeva, and Ukrainian refugees there say they would avoid her if they did.

“It would be great if Switzerland would take her property away,” says Katerina Chaplynska, 25, who fled to Switzerland with her teenage sister after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Some Russians, too, say they would not like to see Kabaeva, including Victoria Bussi, 34. She says she used to support Putin, but now found him less mysterious, more a plain war criminal.

“He destroyed Russia’s reputation,” she says.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Subscribe to gift this article

Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe.

Subscribe now

Already a subscriber?

Read More

Latest In Europe

Fetching latest articles