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The lonely and secret lives of the sons believed to be Putin's

Gazetarët kanë raportuar prej kohësh se Putin-i ka dy djem me ish-gjimnasten olimpike dhe politikanen Alina Kabayeva

2024-09-21 09:10:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

In June, Russia's Radio Free Europe Service reported that satellite images showed that Russian President Vladimir Putin's Valdai resort residence has been fortified with anti-aircraft defenses - apparently to protect against Ukrainian drones.

The lakeside home — halfway between St. Petersburg and Moscow and a 20-minute helicopter ride from the Kremlin — is the primary residence of Putin's two young sons, according to a report by the Dossier Center, an investigative news outlet funded by former oil tycoon and vocal critic of Putin, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who lives in exile.

Journalists have long reported that Putin has two sons with former Olympic gymnast and politician Alina Kabayeva, but the report in the Dossier — based largely on interviews with a source who lived and worked at the residence and spent time with the two sons — goes much further.

Putin, 71, and the Kremlin have been tight-lipped about the president's family during his decades in power.

The lonely and secret lives of the sons believed to be Putin's

"I never discuss my family with anyone. Every person has the right to his own destiny. They live their lives and they do so with dignity," Putin said during a televised press conference in 2015.

Retired athlete Alina Kabayeva during a sporting event in Kazan in June.
However, this month, during a visit to the Tyva region, Putin made an unusual comment while visiting a local school.

"Some of my family members, the little ones, also speak Chinese - fluently," he said.

It is not clear whether he was referring to the three grandchildren he reportedly has from his two daughters from his marriage to Lyudmila Putin, which ended in divorce in 2014, or the sons he is said to have with Kabayevan, 41, and who were born in 2015 and 2019.

The girls

Putin's eldest daughter, Maria, was born in Leningrad in 1985 and is currently 39 years old.

Although Putin has not confirmed the reports, she has been identified as endocrinologist Maria Vladimirovna Vorontseva. She has been heavily involved in a state-funded cancer center outside St. Petersburg as a major shareholder in a company called Nomeko, which manages the $634 million project.

The lonely and secret lives of the sons believed to be Putin's

Putin's youngest daughter Yekaterina was born in Dresden - then part of East Germany - in 1986 and is now 38. Journalists have identified her as Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova, the former acrobatic ballerina who runs a state-funded daycare center under the auspices of Moscow State University.

She is also deputy director of the University's Institute for Mathematical Research of Complex Systems. From 2013 to 2018, she was married to billionaire businessman Kirill Shamalov.

Putin has been romantically involved with Kabayevan since 2008, before divorcing Lyudmila in 2014.

In 2020, the Russian website The Insider reported that the Ministry of Health's chief gynecologist, Leila Adamyan, and her daughter were registered as the owners of real estate in Moscow, worth about 1 billion rubles, or $11 million. .

The purchase comes months after reports that Kabayeva was born at the National Medical Research Center for Obstetrics, Gynecology and Perinatology, Kulakov, in Moscow, where Adamyan worked.

Investigative journalist Sergei Kanev reported at the time that the hospital was searched and fully secured by agents of the Federal Defense Service (FSO).

On May 23, 2019, two weeks after Kabayeva was born, Putin personally awarded Adamyan the Order of Service to the Fatherland in a lavish ceremony in the Kremlin.

The lonely and secret lives of the sons believed to be Putin's

According to the Dossier report, Putin's first son with Kabayevan, Ivan, was born in 2015, while his youngest son, Vladimir, was born in 2019. The Dossier said it also has photos of the boys, but that it has decided not to publish them, to protect minors.

"They don't spend much time with their parents," Ilya Rozhdestvensky, lead researcher for the Dossier report, told Russia's Radio Free Europe Service.

"According to our information, about 30 to 60 minutes a day... Nannies, to some extent, replace their parents, eating breakfast with them and teaching and exercising with them," he said.

According to him, Ivan, in particular, loves Putin very much.

"The boy is very happy about their joint hockey games. The boys team up with Vladimir Putin against FSO agents. Ivan told the servants a story... telling them that his parents told him that when he was born, his father was so happy that he shouted: Hooray! Finally, boy!” Rozhdestvensky confessed.

Olympic artistic gymnastics champion Alina Kabayeva after receiving her award from President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, December 21, 2005.
He said both boys are learning English and German.

"It is possible that they are preparing for athletic careers. They have professional coaches - one in gymnastics and one in swimming. They also have a chess teacher. The eldest son also studies academic subjects", according to him.

"They rarely see children their own age. Only on holidays like New Year's, when the family invites friends. Friends - after spending several weeks in quarantine - arrive in Valdai and bring their children," said Rozhdestvensky.

"Crown Princes"

The Dossier's insider source also directed investigators to an ad that appeared earlier this year on the website of elite recruitment agency English Nanny - a company that recruits domestic helpers for wealthy people from Russia, Kazakhstan, China and elsewhere.

The ad sought an "English teacher for two children aged 4 and 8 in the St. Petersburg region."

"The family lives in isolation," the ad said. It offered a monthly salary of 7,700 euros and said that the tutor "would work in isolation" and "would not leave the employer's territory".

According to the report in the Dossier, workers at the home are reluctant to discipline the children or set limits, and the boys grow up in an atmosphere of private jets and yachts.

Before Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they regularly spent time with Kabayevan on the Russian president's 82-meter yacht Graceful, worth $119 million, the report said.

"If everyone runs after them and fulfills their every wish and they act like they're crown princes... then it's no wonder they take everything for granted," Rozhdestvensky said.

Russian journalist Konstantin Eggert, who works for Deutsche Welle, said Putin's sons "live exactly as the children of Russia's imperial family lived, except in a more closed spiritual and physical space."

"It is clear that they think of themselves as a new nobility, a new aristocracy. They rule Russia exactly as it was ruled in the era of slavery," said Eggert.

"The life of these young nobles, compared to the massive shelling of Ukrainian cities, is a monstrous contrast of our times", according to him.

"Of course, this is a sign of the moral decay of the Russian elite and the indifference of Russian society. This speaks volumes for Russia's moral crisis. The fate of these two boys is only part of the big landscape of this monstrous crisis, which has been developing for years," says Eggert./Prepared by: Valona Tela-REL