Russian President Vladimir Putin is said to have had a secret relationship with Alina Kabayeva (38), a former top gymnast for years. The two would also have children. Putin is said to have taken his mistress and their offspring to safety before the start of the Russian war in Ukraine to a highly secured chalet in Switzerland. A petition is now calling on the country to extradite Kabayeva and return him to Russia.
Read everything about the Russian invasion in this dossier.
38-year-old gymnast Alina Kabayeva won two gold medals at the Olympics. After her career as a gymnast, she became a Member of Parliament for Putin’s United Russia party. She also chairs the board of the National Media Group, whose TV channels and newspapers are controlled by the Kremlin. Her salary would be more than 9.6 million euros per year.
The two have been a couple for years and are said to have children. According to one source, Putin and Kabayeva had a daughter in 2015 and twin boys in 2019. According to another source, they have twin girls and two younger sons. The children, whom Putin has never officially recognized, are said to have Swiss nationality. They fled to Switzerland with their mother before the war in Ukraine started. They would stay in a highly secured luxury chalet not far from Lugano.
Putin’s opponents in Ukraine, Belarus and in Russia itself are now calling on Switzerland via a petition to extradite Alina Kabayeva and return to Russia. In order to “unite Eva Braun with her Führer”, it sounds in a direct reference to Adolf Hitler and his mistress. The petition calls for Kabayeva to bear the consequences of her relationship with Putin. “Despite the ongoing war, Switzerland continues to host an accomplice of Putin’s regime,” the petition reads. Kabayeva is not on the Western list of those in Putin’s entourage against whom sanctions were imposed following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
Switzerland denies that Kabayeva and her children are staying in the country. There is also no evidence for it. Others believe that Putin’s mistress and the children are living in the president’s abode in the Altai Mountains of Mongolia. Some 60,000 people have already signed the petition to get Kabayeva out of Switzerland again.
Kabayeva rarely appears in public. She was seen dancing in a video of a rhythmic gymnastics tournament in Moscow last December. A few weeks before her alleged lover started a war in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin is said to have had many mistresses since he divorced his wife Lyudmila Shkrebneva in 2013. Putin and Shkrebneva married in 1983. They have two daughters together.
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