Russia, who are Putin’s daughters, hit by US sanctions

The US sanctions have also affected Putin’s daughters: Katerina Tikhonova, 35, and Maria Vorontsova, 36. The two women have never publicly confirmed that the Russian president was their father (very private about his personal life), but they would be born from Putin’s marriage to his mother Lyudmilla, a flight attendant of the national airline Aeroflot, which ended in divorce in 2013. According to the Kremlin website, Maria was born in 1985 and Katerina in 1986, after the family moved to Dresden, then to East Germany, where Putin worked for the KGB.

Putin’s daughters

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Katerina Tikhonova she is known on YouTube as an acrobatic rock’n’roll dancer: in the published videos she performs flips and somersaults in the main international competitions. But a 2015 Reuters news agency investigation highlighted her ties and her influence on the Moscow elite. Katerina, one mathematics who is now deputy director of the Institute for Mathematical Research on Complex Systems of the Moscow State University, in support of the Russian government and the defense industry, she was reportedly married to Kirill Shamalov (who is already under sanctions), son of Nikolai Shamalov, a longtime friend of Putin who is also a shareholder of Bank Rossiya. The couple’s corporate holdings would be worth around $ 2 billion. Not to mention other assets and properties.

His sister Maria Vorontsova studied biology at St. Petersburg University and medicine at Moscow State University: he is a endocrine system physician and leads government-funded programs (who have received billions of dollars from the Kremlin) for genetic research, and which are personally supervised by Putin. Her ex-husband worked for Gazprombank, with strong ties to the Kremlin elite.

A senior US official said Washington believes that “Putin’s assets are hidden among family members, and that’s why we targeted them. ” Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy, co-authors of the Russian president’s biography, Who is Mr Putin?, they explained that “personal information is remarkably scarce for such an important public figure. Putin’s wife, daughters and other family members, for example, are conspicuously absent from the public domain ”.

At its annual press conference in 2015, Putin told the audience that he was proud of his daughters: «They continue to study and work. My daughters are fluent in three European languages ​​». But “talk about where exactly my daughters work and what they do, I never did and I won’t now, for many reasons, including security concerns, ”Putin said. “They simply live their lives and do it with dignity.”

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Source: Vanity Fair

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