Little is known about the two young women, aged 35 and 36, who could face asset freezes and travel bans starting today.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and retired flight attendant Lyudmila Putina have been married for three decades. As a result of that long relationship that ended in divorce in 2013, Katerina and Mariya were born, two women about whom little is known and who are now part of the list of those sanctioned by the West for the invasion ordered by their father in Ukraine.
Although information about them is scarce and often confusing, it is known that Mariya Vorontsova, the older of the two, was born in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, in 1985, is an endocrinologist and co-owner of a health care investment project. She is married to the Dutchman Jorrit Faassen, who was an executive of the Russian state gas company Gazprom and of Stroytransgaz, a pipe manufacturer, and it is believed that they have at least one son, as is clear from the confession that Putin made to the film director Oliver Stone in 2017, when he told her that he was a grandfather.
‘Newskweek’ magazine reported that after the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH-17, a Dutch tabloid claimed that Mariya was living in the Netherlands with her partner. After identifying her supposed residence, in a block of flats, groups of journalists as well as Ukrainian citizens gathered outside. The mayor requested that she be deported to Russia, but it was not confirmed if she actually lived there.
A year after Mariya was born in Germany, where the family lived while Putin worked there for the KGB, Katerina Tikhonova. When the family returned to Moscow in 1996, the girls continued their education at a German school, but when he became president, Putin decided that they should continue studying at home. Afterwards, they attended university although with false identities, in an attempt by their father to keep them anonymous, away not only from the public eye but from danger. Putin, moreover, has never allowed the press to report on his private life. In the book ‘First Person: A Staggeringly Candid Self-Portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin’, written by a team of several journalists who had authorized access to the President’s inner circle, the girls, then teenagers, complained that they had been removed from the school and having to go everywhere with bodyguards.
great heritage
Although her own father, in an unusual intervention in which he spoke about his daughters, said that Katerina’s areas of interest were Oriental studies and Japanese culture, there are images of her time competing in acrobatic dance competitions and now she works in the area scientist, directing an artificial intelligence institute linked to the mathematics faculty of the Moscow State University, a ‘startup’ that according to ‘Bloomberg’ is valued at about 1.7 billion dollars (just over 1.5 billion euros). The ‘Business Insider’ ensures that last year she had a public speech at the International Economic Forum in St. Petersburg in Russia, the country’s equivalent to Davos, although three years earlier she had already appeared in a television interview talking about biotechnology .
In 2018, she divorced Kirill Shamalov, son of Nikolai Shamalov, a friend of Putin whom she married very young. When they separated, both shared a millionaire estate, which at the time Reuters valued at two billion dollars and which included a villa of about four million euros in the French town of Biarritz, a house with which it is not known what happened after divorce and whether Katerina or her sister have other assets somewhere in Europe. The couple were part of the Russian ‘royal’ generation, that is, young people with fairytale lives of princes and princesses thanks to the wealth and power of their parents and who often marry each other to continue accumulating money and influence within the same circle.
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