VOORSCHOTEN, Netherlands — Vladimir Putin didn’t just like the prying.
It was 2008, and the Russian president, then 56 and eight years into his tightening grip on energy, stood for a information convention in Sardinia’s lavish Villa Certosa. At his facet was his closest ally in Western Europe, Silvio Berlusconi, the media mogul and Italian prime minister of legendarily hedonist appetites with whom he shared a style for raunchy jokes, over-the-top furnishings and huge wealth.
In the course of the summers, Mr. Putin’s two teenage daughters had the run of the sprawling villa, happening secret luxurious procuring and boating excursions underneath strict orders that their identities stay hid and their faces hidden from cameras, in response to an individual with data of the association.
That technique of strictly shielding his household labored effectively for Mr. Putin through the years, till Russia invaded Ukraine in February. Now, as nations impose sanctions on these closest to him — together with these accepted on Friday by Britain on the lady lengthy thought-about to be his mistress, Alina Kabaeva, and his former spouse, Lyudmila Ocheretnaya — the facade is starting to crumble, shedding new gentle on the Russian chief’s personal life.
A number of the first glimmers of his difficult household affairs unfolded in that scene on the villa, as a Russian reporter, Nataliya Melikova of Nezavisimaya Gazeta, gingerly broached the forbidden zone. Days earlier than, a report in Moskovsky Korrespondent claimed that Mr. Putin and his spouse of 25 years had secretly cut up. Enticingly, the newspaper additional reported that he had fallen for Ms. Kabaeva, a famously versatile Olympic gold medalist in rhythmic gymnastics, who, at 24, was concerning the age of his daughters and had turn into a public face of his political get together.
“I’ve at all times reacted negatively to those that, with their snotty noses and erotic fantasies, meddle in different folks’s lives,” Mr. Putin stated, denying the report. Mr. Berlusconi mimed taking pictures Ms. Melikova with an imaginary machine gun as Mr. Putin, who by then had been accused of murdering a number of journalists, nodded and smiled. Days later, Moskovsky Korrespondent halted operations for “monetary causes.”
Mr. Putin is greater than only a protecting father who, as he has stated, needed to present his daughters a standard life and regarded their security a matter of nationwide safety. A former Ok.G.B. operative steeped within the company’s methods of subterfuge, disinformation and the Janus-like potential to current completely different selves relying on the scenario, he has shrouded his private life in secrecy and wrapped it in rumor.
He has two formally acknowledged daughters from his first marriage, however in response to unbiased Russian information shops and unverified worldwide information studies, he could have 4 extra kids with two different girls. But even his acknowledged daughters, now approaching center age, are so hidden as to be unrecognizable on a Moscow road. His former spouse, whom some biographers consider he married to enhance his possibilities of coming into the bachelor-resistant Ok.G.B., primarily vanished from view even earlier than they divorced.
Within the villa-dotted Russian enclaves of Switzerland, a petition started circulating in March demanding the repatriation of his supposed paramour, Ms. Kabaeva, angrily evaluating her with Hitler’s mistress, Eva Braun. In Lugano, locals whisper concerning the inexperienced glass constructing Ms. Kabaeva lived in overlooking the lake and converse with confidence concerning the hospital the place her rumored kids have been born and the colleges they attended. However they haven’t seen her.
The supposed kids are unverified and invisible. In a Monte Carlo luxurious condominium constructing, residents shrug at photos of one other doable girlfriend and baby of Mr. Putin’s who owned property there, and whose household shares addresses with Ms. Kabaeva’s household in unique Moscow luxurious buildings. In lots of instances, they’re apparitions, and as in lots of ghost tales, the phantoms can appear conjured for a desired impact, both by critics to undercut Mr. Putin’s self-made picture as a protector of household values or by supporters to compound the picture of Mr. Putin’s wealth, virility and mysteriousness. Or possibly they’re merely actual.
“There’s so many tales. All of them will be true or none of them will be true. And that’s type of the fog of Putin,” stated Nina Khrushcheva, a Moscow-born professor of worldwide affairs on the New Faculty in New York. Mr. Putin, she stated, was directly each obsessively clandestine and an exhibitionist who fed off the Western depiction of him as a supervillain.
The good-granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, Ms. Khrushcheva stated that Mr. Putin had a byzantine worldview typical of the Kremlin, and like Stalin, he embraced and perpetuated mythology peppered with fact. “You create misinformation,” she stated. “You create an environment of one thing that everyone is guessing and everyone is discussing and the whole lot is secret.”
Some issues do appear clear sufficient, although. Members of Mr. Putin’s household circle are beneficiaries of a kleptocratic system that Mr. Putin guidelines over like a mafia don, with oligarch lieutenants paying him tribute within the type of wealth, profitable jobs or luxurious villas lavished on his household and people within the potential orbit of his affection. For many years, few succeeded in penetrating the opaque protecting bubble constructed round them and their assets, however Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has modified that.
In April, the USA aimed into the fog and imposed sanctions on his two daughters, citing them as relations of a penalized individual — Mr. Putin — and asserting their help for the Russian protection trade and reception of billions of {dollars} of funds immediately overseen by Mr. Putin. The American authorities additionally practically positioned sanctions on Ms. Kabaeva, however pulled again on the final second to keep away from, for now, an escalation, officers stated.
Sanctions consultants say these measures have been much less meant to do Mr. Putin concrete monetary hurt than to ship him a message that his aggression had crossed a line, and that his invisible and untouchable personal world may very well be seen and reached by the West.
“Total, sanctions that aren’t accepted by the U.N. Safety Council are dangerous, most significantly, they’re ineffective,” stated Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin’s spokesman, when requested for touch upon the Western sanctions in opposition to Mr. Putin’s relations. “Sanctions in opposition to households, family members, acquaintances and journalists are silly.” Requested whether or not the Kremlin believed sanctions in opposition to Ms. Kabaeva and her family members have been a private affront in opposition to Mr. Putin, Mr. Peskov added, “That is simply an absurd resolution!”
The Dutch Department
On a grassy plot of land on the outskirts of Amsterdam, protesters not too long ago despatched a message to Mr. Putin by means of his daughter Maria. Close to Ukrainian flags planted in the midst of a coronary heart fabricated from candles, an indication addressed to “Ave Maria Putin” learn: “It appears your outdated man is difficult to succeed in and clearly inconceivable to cease even by his hangmen. However as everyone knows, fathers and daughters are a unique story,” and, “We beg you, Maria.”
What at first appeared an unlikely place for an enchantment — and an unlikely individual to enchantment to — made extra sense when one understood that the land had not too long ago been purchased by Jorrit Faassen, a Dutch man who was as soon as married to and has at the very least one baby with Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, as Mr. Putin’s eldest daughter is understood. Within the 15 years since Ms. Vorontsova secretly started residing with Mr. Faassen within the Netherlands, she had at instances turn into the main target of native ire in opposition to her authoritarian father.
Issues grew significantly tense in 2014, after Russia-backed separatists shot down a Malaysia Airways jet departing from Amsterdam over Ukraine, killing 298 folks, together with practically 200 Dutch. Mayors all through the Netherlands demanded Ms. Vorontsova be deported, and scrutiny has elevated with the present struggle in Ukraine.
A Dutch investigative information outlet, Observe the Cash, reached Mr. Faassen in Russia not too long ago.
In a robust Hague accent, he referred to as the struggle in Ukraine an inconvenience and denied that he had been the husband of Ms. Vorontsova. “He was not comfortable,” stated the editor who interviewed him, Harry Lensink.
Since then, the reporters have been sick comfortable, too, and nervous about their telephones being tapped. A contributor to their article about Mr. Faassen obtained discover that an individual utilizing a server in Moscow had tried to hack his electronic mail account.
All of that anger and anxiousness was far faraway from the revelry at a celebration celebrating the couple in 2008 in Wassenaar, maybe essentially the most unique and rich space in all of the Netherlands. “It was a marriage get together,” recalled Danny Plezier, an area singer of Dutch folks songs who carried out on the affair.
He stated the visitors sang alongside together with his hits, and he shook arms with the groom, whom he had identified for years, and his new bride. Mr. Plezier stated he had no thought she was Mr. Putin’s daughter and left after his set.
Hardly anybody on the marriage ceremony knew a lot about her, although friends of Mr. Faassen, who moved to Moscow for enterprise in 2006, gave clues of their rowdy speeches. They joked about their pastime of hitting on wealthy Russian women in Moscow golf equipment.
Maria’s dad and mom didn’t attend her Dutch marriage ceremony get together. Some Russians did, nonetheless, together with match males who watched from the bar as a relative of the bride — a younger girl who sang a touching, conventional Russian tune — danced emphatically to tango music.
The groom’s cousin Casper Faassen, now a distinguished Dutch artist, stated that the subsequent time he noticed his cousin’s spouse, Maria, was at his aunt’s celebration within the close by city of Merenwijk. As visitors angled for Indonesian meals on the buffet, he stated, Maria appeared composed however aside, trying elegant in a beige costume, standing with good, dancerlike posture. She communicated with everybody, together with her husband, in good English and spoke little Dutch.
The couple ultimately ordered a few of Mr. Faassen’s artwork items. He recalled delivering three blurred photos of ballerinas in opposition to a gold-leaf background to their condominium above the native Albert Heijn grocery store in close by Voorschoten. Maria answered the door as her husband, Jorrit, loafed on the sofa in entrance of the tv. As he got here in, Casper joked about his cousin being a sofa potato, and recalled that Maria rolled her eyes in solidarity.
Neither Casper nor many others within the household knew the true identification of the lady who went as Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, and now Maria Faassen, however Masha to her father. However in 2010, a Russian information outlet, New Instances, reported that Jorrit, then an official at a Russian consultancy agency, obtained a beating from the bodyguards of Matvey Urin, a prime Russian banker who didn’t know who he was coping with, after a street rage episode in Moscow.
Mr. Urin promptly misplaced licenses to function banks and the bodyguards ended up in jail. Russian gossip reporters speculated that the Dutchman was Mr. Putin’s son-in-law, although Jorrit at all times denied it.
The couple spent a lot of their time in Moscow, the place paperwork listed him as an official at Gazprombank. Casper stated his cousin as soon as provided him the potential of profitable connections and gross sales in Russia. However by then, the rumors of Maria’s parentage had begun to flow into and the artist, who reviled Mr. Putin for his undercutting of democracy and violent crackdowns, demurred.
“I stated, ‘Thanks, however no thanks,’” he stated, and steered away from the couple from then on.
However native residents paid extra consideration to them. On a current afternoon across the luxurious high-rise the place Jorrit purchased the highest two flooring, one Ukrainian neighbor expressed disgust on the former inhabitants whereas Corien Zoetemelk, 57, who lives throughout the road from the penthouse rental, recalled seeing the couple at varied instances, together with gliding alongside the canal beneath their condominium constructing.
“I noticed them on their sloop,” she stated. “She was pregnant.”
On the second-floor balcony of their constructing subsequent to the canal, an older man stated that he “was on the elevator together with her as soon as,” and that “she regarded like her father.” The person stated the couple additionally had a son, or at the very least folks had seen Jorrit, who averted contact together with his neighbors, with just a little boy. The person on the balcony stopped speaking when his spouse angrily referred to as him into the condominium. “They’ll get you for this,” she hissed.
Sergei Roldugin, a cellist and a detailed — and fabulously enriched — buddy of Mr. Putin, now on the USA’ and European Union’s sanctions lists, and Maria’s godfather, as soon as advised an interviewer that she had a son in 2012. In a 2017 interview with Oliver Stone, Mr. Putin acknowledged that he had turn into a grandfather.
Some locals are satisfied that they noticed the Russian grandfather go to.
“I did see Putin,” stated Patricia Kortekaas, 62, a member of Voorschoten’s Metropolis Council, as she stood exterior the grocery store he had supposedly entered. She recalled seeing him, flanked by safety, within the espresso and tea aisle.
“He regarded cautious,” she stated. “I assumed, ‘What’s incorrect with him?’” (Mr. Putin’s workplace has denied the visits.)
By 2014, Maria had turn into a specialist in pediatric dwarfism. Her charity venture, Elfa-Endo, which helps kids with endocrine issues, additionally obtained funding from the highly effective — and now underneath sanction — Alfa Financial institution. That may very well be the rationale the U.S. Treasury determined to punish her for main “state-funded packages which have obtained billions of {dollars} from the Kremlin towards genetics analysis and are personally overseen by Mr. Putin.”
These sanctions may harm her new household. In response to a report revealed in April by the unbiased Russian information outlet Meduza and the Russian-language web site Present Time TV, she had by then divorced Jorrit and remarried a Russian man who bought a job on the fuel firm Novatek. A robust oligarch, Gennady Timchenko, who usually pops up as Mr. Putin’s household fixer, and who can also be on sanctions lists, not too long ago sat on Novatek’s board.
Maria couldn’t be reached for remark. Mr. Faassen didn’t return a request for remark left together with his father, who stated, “Go away,” at his house, the place the home windows, historically uncovered in Holland, have been blocked with newspaper.
The ‘Disciplined’ Daughter
From the start, Mr. Putin’s private story appeared full of the stuff of delusion making. He used an official biography — revealed in 2001, when he first took energy as an obvious next-generation democrat — to burnish his picture as a troublesome however heroic household man. In it, he tells the story of personally saving the household, whereas bare, when a defective sauna burned down the household dacha.
“The women suffered essentially the most from the incident,” Mr. Putin stated of his two daughters. “They’d introduced all their treasures from house to the dacha — all their toys and Barbie dolls, which they’d been accumulating their entire lives. Masha advised me later that she couldn’t sleep for a number of months after that. They’d misplaced the whole lot that was acquainted to them.”
Now, the conflagration of Mr. Putin’s struggle in Ukraine has threatened to strip them of the whole lot once more.
That goes, too, for his second daughter, Katya, who, as Mr. Putin tells it, “turned out to be essentially the most disciplined.”
“After I shouted, ‘Everyone get out of the home!’” he says, “she dropped her spoon on the desk and leaped out of the home with out asking any questions.”
Certainly, Katya, who lived underneath the alias Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova, appears to be the one who has adhered extra to Mr. Putin’s circle of affect. In February 2013, she reportedly married Kirill Shamalov, the son of Nikolai Shamalov, a detailed affiliate of Mr. Putin’s and main shareholder of the Financial institution Rossiya. Certainly one of Mr. Putin’s most well-liked ski resorts, Igora, offered an idyllic winter setting, with the names Kirill and Katerina written within the snow.
In 2020, Meduza and one other unbiased Russian information outlet, Essential Tales, obtained emailed marriage ceremony invitations that Mr. Shamalov despatched to Maria, Jorrit and their son in Holland. The marriage was stated to have indoor ice skating, a laser lighting show and a fake Russian village with assorted performances.
Katerina was herself a seasoned performer who had turn into obsessed with acrobatic rock ’n’ roll dancing. In 2013, she and her dance companion, Ivan Klimov, who flipped her by means of the air as she wore a leotard and white sneakers, carried out on the Boogie-Woogie World Masters of acrobatic rock.
“Everybody knew she was Putin’s daughter,” stated Edilio Pagano, who usually judged the occasions that Katerina competed in however stated he by no means felt stress to present her larger scores.
Russia-Ukraine Warfare: Key Developments
He stated that Katerina “was not, shall we embrace, an excellent athlete, however she actually cared, in that she was current at each competitors.” She by no means spoke of her lineage, he stated, however was a “very reserved, very form, smiley and effectively mannered” girl who communicated primarily in English.
Round 2014, Mr. Pagano labored together with her on the chief committee of the World Rock ’n’ Roll Confederation, primarily based in Switzerland, the place she was the vice chairman for growth and advertising and marketing. She not often attended conferences, he stated, however when she did, she was at all times accompanied by two bodyguards.
By then, she was busy with greater enterprise. In 2015, the Russian information company RBC reported that she had gone to Switzerland not for a dance competitors, however to attend the “Russian session” of the Davos Discussion board with Mr. Shamalov.
Mr. Putin let slip in a 2011 Russian tv interview that Katerina majored in Oriental research at St. Petersburg College. However as she stepped gingerly into view in 2015, it was because the creator of a math textbook and a half-dozen scientific papers, together with one on house journey and the way the physique reacts to zero gravity. Her co-author, the rector of Moscow State College, Viktor Sadovnichy, didn’t return a request for remark.
But she was greater than an instructional. Katerina headed a analysis institute, Innopraktika, to sponsor and help younger scientists, that was partly financed by the state oil firm Rosneft. The board of Innopraktika, Reuters discovered, had a bunch of Putin confidants and former Ok.G.B. officers, together with some who lived in the identical condominium complicated in Dresden, Germany, when the Putin household was stationed there within the Nineteen Eighties. And by 2014, she helped oversee the $1.7 billion growth of Moscow State College, working as a liaison to the enterprise sector with the title of vice rector.
As she grew professionally, so did her husband’s wealth. Kirill Shamalov acquired from Mr. Timchenko, the Putin-connected oligarch and obvious household fixer, a roughly $3 billion stake in Russia’s main oil and petrochemical firm and have become one in every of its prime shareholders. The couple additionally acquired from Mr. Timchenko, for an undisclosed worth, a seaside villa in Biarritz, France. (In March, Russian activists broke into that villa and tried to make it accessible to Ukrainian refugees.)
In 2018, Katerina appeared on a Russian tv present, which recognized her because the “director of Innopraktika and deputy director of the Institute of Mathematical Research of Complicated Programs at Moscow State College.” Within the phase, she spoke in entrance of a pc graphic of a head wired to electrodes. (The U.S. Treasury Division positioned sanctions on her for being “a tech govt whose work” helps the Russian authorities “and protection trade.”)
That yr, Bloomberg reported that the couple divorced and shared practically $2 billion in property. America positioned sanctions on Mr. Shamalov, figuring out him because the “former husband” of Katerina. Her real love nonetheless gave the impression to be dance. In 2019, she grew to become a council member of Russia’s World Dance Sport Federation.
However Miriam Kerpan IIzak, the president of the World Rock ’N’ Roll Confederation, stated Katerina was now not related to the group. “I don’t have any contact together with her,” she stated, including, “She’s not energetic anymore.”
The Different Ladies in Putin’s Life
Mr. Putin’s struggle has additionally pressured different kids linked to him to tug again from their most well-liked public actions.
Elizaveta Vladimirovna Krivonogikh, whose patronymic means she is the daughter of a Vladimir, is a 19-year-old who performed up her doable connection to Mr. Putin to achieve tens of 1000’s of followers on her Instagram account, full of photos of her coyly hiding her face. In interviews, Luiza, as she is understood, admitted that she regarded so much like Mr. Putin and stated that if the president stood earlier than her, she would ask him, “Why?” However the struggle introduced offended consideration and her account all of a sudden disappeared.
Luiza is the daughter of Svetlana Krivonogikh, 47, a former cleansing girl in St. Petersburg, who, by means of an alleged relationship with Mr. Putin, became an actual property baroness, a board member of Mr. Putin’s private Financial institution Rossiya and a serious stakeholder within the Igora ski resort the place Mr. Putin’s second daughter, Katerina, was married.
In 2021, the discharge of the Pandora Papers — hundreds of thousands of leaked paperwork from offshore monetary corporations — and an earlier investigation by Proekt, which was subsequently banned in Russia, confirmed that Svetlana’s value was estimated to be round 100 million euros, or about $105 million, and included a $3.75 million Monaco condominium.
Maria Pevchikh, the top of investigations on the Anti-Corruption Basis, a Russian nonprofit group based by the Russian opposition politician Aleksei A. Navalny, was sure that Mr. Putin had fathered kids together with his mistresses and that they’d lived in luxurious overseas.
She pointed to paper trails that indicated extravagant wealth for the ladies and their households and to property data displaying {that a} Gazprom subsidiary gave luxurious residences in the identical Moscow constructing to the moms of Ms. Kabaeva and Ms. Krivonogikh.
On a current afternoon, as Russians climbed into unique sports activities automobiles in entrance of Monte Carlo’s landmark on line casino, residents of the condominium constructing there stated they’d by no means seen both Ms. Krivonogikh or her daughter. The doorman stated she didn’t reside there.
On April 22, Mr. Putin’s supposedly present mistress — and by some accounts, his new spouse, Ms. Kabaeva — appeared in Moscow at her annual Alina Competition, a patriotic gymnastics occasion. An advisory member of the Nationwide Media Group, managed by the highly effective oligarch Yuri Kovalchuk, she rallied help for the invasion of Ukraine in entrance of the “Z” indicators which might be symbols of Mr. Putin’s struggle.
The Swiss and worldwide information media have usually reported as a on condition that Ms. Kabaeva, who was residing in Switzerland, had Mr. Putin’s baby on the Sant’Anna clinic close to Lugano in 2015, when he disappeared for eight days. (“Doesn’t correspond to actuality,” the Kremlin spokesman, Mr. Peskov, stated on the time.)
The Lugano clinic, its pristine foyer stuffed on a current afternoon with pregnant girls talking Russian, declined to remark. A 2019 report in a Russian newspaper saying that Ms. Kabaeva had given beginning to twins vanished from the net.
Round Lugano, residents are sure that she had as soon as lived underneath heavy guard within the glass luxurious constructing overlooking the lake in Lugano’s Paradiso neighborhood.
“I do know she lived right here,” stated Olena Utkina, a Ukrainian girl who labored in a magnificence salon down the block. Some are so sure that Ms. Kabaeva lived there that they’ve sought to kick her out, circulating a petition demanding that Switzerland “take motion and reunite Alina ‘Eva Braun’ Kabaeva together with her ‘Führer.’”
However the doorman on the constructing stated he had labored there for 10 years and had by no means seen anybody by that title. Nobody within the cafes of the Collina d’Oro, a fabulously rich space common with the town’s Russian enclave, had ever seen her. And the couple’s reported kids have by no means publicly materialized.
“They’ve by no means been right here,” stated Invoice Eichner, a director on the unique American faculty in Switzerland, the place an utility for a brand new Russian scholar, to be vetted in opposition to the rising sanctions record, sat on his desk.
Not one of the devoted on the close by Russian Orthodox Church stated they’d ever seen Ms. Kabaeva, and Ukrainian refugees there stated they might keep away from her in the event that they did.
“It might be nice if Switzerland would take her property away,” stated Katerina Chaplynska, 25, who fled to Switzerland together with her teenage sister after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some Russians, too, stated they might not wish to see Ms. Kabaeva, together with Victoria Bussi, 34. She stated she used to help Mr. Putin, however now discovered him much less mysterious, extra a plain struggle legal.
“He destroyed Russia’s repute,” she stated.
Claire Moses contributed reporting from the Netherlands, and Ivan Nechepurenko from Istanbul.
