The West’s sanctions also affect Vladimir Putin’s two daughters, Katerina and Maria. For decades they were publicly invisible. Who are they? What relationship do they have with their father? And why did they never choose to bear their father’s last name?
Some things can be guessed, for example that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was an absent father. In the years when he was more approachable than today, the Russian leader himself recognized that there was little time left for fatherhood. Intimates of the family said that his daughters Maria and Katerina sometimes did not see him for months when they were young.
There are often absent fathers among men who reach the political top. Some do like to show their children to the world. Nearly all of Trump’s children hold prominent positions in his retinue. The two recognized Putin children — the daughters of his marriage to Lyudmila Shkrebneva, whom he officially divorced in 2013 — were publicly invisible for decades.
Some say that Putin deliberately ‘hidden’ his daughters, others that they avoided the limelight themselves. Both daughters do not use the family name. The eldest daughter was born in April 1985 in Leningrad as Maria Vladimirovna Putina, but goes through life as Maria Vorontsova, which is not a husband’s name. Her sister Yekaterina Vladimirovna Putina was born 16 months later in Dresden – where Putin was stationed by the KGB, the Soviet state security service, in late 1985 – but for years has used the name Katerina Tikhonova, after her maternal grandmother.
The war in Ukraine has put an end to the anonymity of Putin’s daughters. On April 6, the day after the atrocities committed by the Russian army in Butya became known, the United States placed both Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova on its sanctions list. “Much of Putin’s fortune is hidden with his relatives,” said a White House spokesman. The European Union and Great Britain followed suit on April 8. In recent weeks, the Putin daughters have suddenly become the subject of international media attention. They searched for intimates, guessed at partners, dug in archive footage.
Raised in Germany
For both daughters, the invasion of Ukraine seems to have come as a complete surprise. The eldest daughter Maria, in particular, does not seem to thank her father for his special military operation. She has most often tried to make a career independently of him, about to open a private medical clinic in Moscow for a wealthy international clientele – a project that the new sanctions against Russia have put an end to in one fell swoop.
Both Putin daughters speak German fluently. They attended kindergarten in Dresden. After the fall of the Wall they moved to Leningrad (again St Petersburg from 1991), but a few years later they were back in Dresden. It was the wild 1990s, gang wars were raging in Saint Petersburg, Putin arranged a safe German private school for his daughters. This father, family acquaintances said, was absent but ‘protective from a distance’. Putin’s Stasi colleague Matthias Warnig – now executive director of Nord Stream AG, which pumps gas from Russia to Germany – was the girls’ guardian in those years.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Maria studied biology in Saint Petersburg and medicine in Moscow, Katerina mathematics and physics in Moscow. Both Putin daughters have been hailed as outstanding students. It cannot be ruled out that they were, but it is not certain either. Until 1991, children of Soviet elites invariably completed prestigious education with high marks. Both Putin’s daughters were studying at Russian state universities when their father’s power was almost total.
Dutch connection
Both in her choice of profession and her partner, the youngest daughter Katerina seems to have remained in her father’s network after her studies. She was appointed head of the Innopraktika knowledge center at the University of Moscow. From 2013 to 2018, she was married to the son of oligarch Nilokai Shamalov, a close confidant of her father. In those years she was often seen at his villa in Biarritz, France. Images circulate online of Katerina practicing her hobby, acrobatic rock and roll. In 2013, she became fifth – with a dance partner other than her then husband – at a tournament in Switzerland.
There are more images of Putin’s eldest daughter Maria. Not long before the war, she was interviewed on Russian state television in her role as a pediatric docrinologist. Viewers were in the dark that this doctor was “the daughter of.” Unlike her younger sister, Maria seems to have had the ambition to step outside her father’s network. An indication in that direction is that she chose a Western European partner. Whether Maria was ever officially married to the Dutch marines son Jorrit Faassen (1980) is a subject of speculation. In March Faassen denied to the news website Follow the Money having once been Putin’s son-in-law: ‘I’d like to get that story out of the way.’
Faassen states that he has been living in Moscow with another Russian woman for years – reconstructions nevertheless leave little doubt that he and Putin’s eldest daughter were together for a while and have a son. In those years Faassen probably held positions at the technical construction company Strojtransgaz, as well as at Gazprom. Until 2015, he and Maria stayed parts of the year in a luxury apartment in the Crimean district of Voorschoten. The measures that followed the MH17 disaster would have forced the two not to show up in the Netherlands after that. Sometime in the years that followed, they broke up in Moscow.
Remotely protective
In 2017, Maria was seen with a younger Russian man, Yevgeny Nagorni, with whom she also has a son. Again, this was not a ‘safe’ choice of partner, because in mid-2013 this man had denounced her father’s regime as a police state on social media. Today, he abstains from comment and is on the payroll of the gas company Novatek. In 2019, he and Maria were photographed dancing at a friends wedding in Italy.
In Italy they will not be seen again anytime soon. Since April 8, an entry ban has been in place throughout the European Union for both Maria Vorontsova and her sister. The British Daily Mail reported that the eldest Putin daughter had planned to celebrate her 37th birthday on April 28 on a tropical island of a friendly country, but that her father in the Kremlin refused to allow it “for security reasons”. Putinologists once again saw the father at work who, albeit from a distance, can act ‘protectively’.
Lyudmila Alexandrovna Shkrebneva, Putin’s ex-wife
Maria and Katerina’s mother was officially married to the father from 1983 to 2013. She taught their two daughters discipline, he was the one who spoiled them, she revealed when she was still serving as Russia’s First Lady. Whether this marriage resulted from a great love is doubted by putinologists. Putin himself went so far as to state that he thought it was “time to get married” in the early 1980s. Lyudmila Shkrebneva was born in 1958 in Kaliningrad, until 1946 the German city of Köningsberg. Before her marriage to Putin, she worked as a flight attendant for Aeroflot, later she taught German. She and Putin officially split up in 2013, after living separately for years. It is suspected that Putin fathered several other children in the 21st century, but nothing has been officially released. His ex-wife was spotted in a villa on the French coast in 2017 with a man twenty years younger, whom she would have remarried in 2015. Last week, the United Kingdom announced that sanctions will be extended to more people close to Putin, including Lyudmila Shkrebneva.
Vladimir Spridonovich Putin, Putin’s father
Since Vladimir Putin was a state security agent of the Soviet Union, there is little official biographical data. His father Vladimir Spridonovich Putin was born in 1911, served in the Soviet navy in the 1930s and fought in the Second World War in a paramilitary unit of the state security service NKVD, the predecessor of the KGB. Putin’s mother Maria Ivanovna Shelomova was also from 1911. Both parents were 41 when Putin was born in 1952. Before that, they had lost two sons. Their first son Albert died shortly after birth in the 1930s. Their second son Viktor was born in 1940 and died of diphtheria during the German siege of Leningrad in 1942. Israeli psychotherapist Avidan Milevsky identified traces of overprotection in his childhood in Putin’s character. “Not only did his parents raise him as an only child, but they did so after they lost their first two children.”