Both adult daughters of Russian President Vladimir Putin touches US sanctions for the first time.
“We believe that many of Putin’s assets are being hidden through relatives and that is why we are targeting them,” a US source told CNBC. Katerina Tikhonova and Maria Vorontsova.
The identities of Putin’s two daughters have never been officially confirmed by him or the Kremlin, and no photos of them as adults have been released. After all, even the number of children Putin has had is a mystery.
Officially, Putin has two children, Maria and Katerina, from his marriage to Ludmila Putina, a former Aeroflot flight attendant, whom he divorced in 2013.
Although the Russian president rarely speaks about his children in public, in 2015, during his annual press conference, he answered a relevant question, saying that his daughters have not left Russia, as it was called then.
“They live in Russia. They did not study anywhere except Russia. I’m proud of them. They continue to study and work. My daughters speak three European languages fluently. “I never talk to anyone about my family,” he said at the time.
“They were never children – stars, they never liked to be under the spotlight. “They just live their lives.”
Putin’s daughters are now being sanctioned by the EU.
They changed their last names: Katerina Tikhonova and Maria Vorontsova pic.twitter.com/8EILfHReNX
– Outspoken ️ ️ (@ Out5p0ken) April 5, 2022
Putin said his daughters “are taking the first steps in their careers” and “have nothing to do with business or politics.” But according to the Guardian, both have since embarked on business ventures.
Katerina Tikhonova, 35, the youngest of two, was born in Dresden while Putin was working as a KGB agent. Tikhonova uses her grandmother’s surname on her mother’s side, studied at St. Petersburg and Moscow State University and has a master’s degree in physics and mathematics.
In addition to her studies, she is interested in Japanese culture and acrobatic rock’n’roll dance. In 2013, together with her couple, they came fifth in the relevant world championship that took place in Switzerland.
Tikhonova married Kirill Samalov, the youngest son of Nikolai Samalov, a Putin adviser and co-owner of Rossiya Bank, which the United States describes as the “personal bank” of top Kremlin officials. Kirill was appointed chief legal officer for Gazprom’s foreign economic activity in 2002, when he was just 20 years old.
The couple got married in a secret 3-day ceremony at the Igora ski resort. He divorced in 2018, without the financial terms of his divorce being known.
Two years before their marriage, Samalov was listed by Forbes as one of Russia’s youngest billionaires after buying a 17% stake in petrochemical company Sibur. A Reuters poll in 2015 estimated the couple had stakes in businesses worth more than $ 2 billion as well as a $ 4 million seaside villa in the French resort of Biarritz.
Tikhonova has held various positions at Moscow University in the past and in 2020 was appointed head of a new $ 1.7 billion artificial intelligence institute at the university. Putin has described the Innopraktika center as “one of the most important tools in the national strategy for the development of artificial intelligence technology.”
Among its official advisers at the university are five members of Putin’s inner circle, including two former KGB agents who lived in the same square where she grew up in Dresden.
Maria Vorontsova, Putin’s eldest daughter, is a 36-year-old pediatric endocrinologist who studies the effects of hormones on the body.
She lives in a penthouse opposite the US embassy in Moscow and in 2019 she saved an interview on state television, revealing her plans for a $ 500 million medical project aimed at helping find a cure for cancer.
Vorontsova married Russian-Dutch businessman Yorit Faassen in 2013 and the couple in the penthouse of an expensive building in Amsterdam. In 2014, Dutch neighbors demanded her deportation after pro-Russian forces shot down flight MH17 over Ukraine.
Recently, the Dutch appealed to Vorontsova to ask her father to end the war in Ukraine. A sign appeared on a plot belonging to the couple that read: “Less than 2,000 kilometers from your peaceful piece of free land, your father is decimating an entire free country and its people. It seems that it is difficult to reach your old man and obviously even his executioners can not stop him. “But as we all know, fathers and daughters are another story.”
There are strong rumors in Russia that Putin also has a third, even more secret, daughter from a long-standing relationship with Svetlana Krivonogich, a Russian businesswoman who is said to have started as a cleaner.
The Pandora Papers have revealed that 46-year-old Krivonogich owns an apartment in Monaco through an offshore company that allegedly started just a few weeks after giving birth to a girl. The Kremlin has denied that she was Putin’s daughter.
He has said in the past: “I have a private life in which I do not allow interference. It must be respected. ”
However, he has admitted that he has grandchildren. “I have grandchildren, I’m happy. They are very good, very sweet. “I enjoy spending time with them,” he said in 2020.
In Russia, meanwhile, Putin is said to have married Alina Kabaeva, a former gymnast, with whom he has two young children.
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