Who are Putin’s daughters, sanctioned by London, Brussels and Washington?

RUSSIA – Reaching children try to reach the father† The United Kingdom welcomed the two daughters of the Russian President Vladimir Putin and that of the head of diplomacy Sergei Lavrov because of the invasion of Ukraine, who said that he had followed the “lavish lifestyle of the inner circle of the Kremlin†

London thus takes over from Washington and Brussels to attack Katerina Tikhonova and Maria Vorontsova. They are now prohibited from entering British territory, where any assets will be frozen. According to a senior US official, Washington is convinced that “Putin’s possessions are hidden by members of his family”.

Now that the Kremlin has kept Vladimir Putin’s family life firmly out of the public sphere, there is little information about his two daughters.

Out of sight from childhood

Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova, in their thirties, were born of Vladimir Putin’s marriage to Lyudmila Putina, a former Aeroflot flight attendant whose divorce the Russian president announced in 2013, becoming the first Russian ruler to divorce since Peter the Great in 1698. , notices the guard†

The official biography of the Russian president on the Kremlin website claims that Maria Vorontsova was born in 1985 before the family moved to Dresden, East Germany, where Vladimir Putin was sent as a KGB agent. His second daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, who uses her maternal grandmother’s surname, was born in this city the following year.

Through a few rare comments over the years, Vladimir Putin reveals that his daughters received their higher education in Russia, speak several European languages ​​and live in Russia. “My children are doing well. They are in Moscow (…). All is well in their private life and professional career. I’m proud of them,” he said in one of his rare public comments in 2012, adding that they were “not involved in business activities” or “in politics.”

An endocrinologist and a mathematician

Today, Maria Vorontosa has been sanctioned for her role in Nomenko, a major investment project company in the health sector that provides “significant sources of revenue” to the Russian government, and is “personally supervised by Putin,” the report said. to consult a document on the new EU sanctions blacklist.

As an endocrinologist and pediatrician, in 2019 she appeared in a Russian television interview about childhood obesity and diabetes. She is married to the Dutch businessman Jorrit Faassen. In 2014, after the crash of MH 17 attributed to pro-Russian separatists, which killed 183 Dutch people, the couple had to leave their residential area under pressure from local authorities and residents. the Parisian†

His sister, Katerina Tikhonova, is identified as a mathematician who manages a support fund for young Russian scientists created by companies whose leaders are “members of the circle of oligarchs close to Putin”.

At a press conference in 2019, Vladimir Putin declined to directly answer a question about his daughters’ growing influence in business and their ties to the state.

Katerina Tikhonova’s Acrobatic Return

Katerina Tikhonova is also a professional acrobatic rock and roll dancer and has participated in prestigious international competitions.

Videos from these tournaments show her dressed in sparkly costumes, in particular leaning on her partner’s hands before being catapulted into the air for an acrobatic return. In 2013, she and her dance partner finished fifth at the world championships in Switzerland.

According to the guard, Tikhonova married Kirill Shamalov, the youngest son of Nikolai Shamalov, a close confidant of Putin and co-owner of the Rossiya Bank, which the US government describes as “the personal bank” of senior Kremlin officials. Kirill Shamalov has been appointed Chief Legal Adviser of Gazprom for foreign economic activity in 2002, when he was only 20 years old.

The couple married in a secret three-day ceremony in the ski resort of Igora in 2013, before divorcing in 2018. Their villa in Biarritz was recently target of activists opposing the war in Ukraine†

In 2020, the Russian president said in an interview that due to “security concerns”, he did not want to share information about his family, while still specifying that he had grandchildren and children, without giving their numbers. He then stated: “I have grandchildren, I am happy. They are very good, so nice. I enjoy spending time with them.”

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