Here are all the women who have won Vladimir Putin’s black heart
Vladimir Putin is notoriously private about the women in his life.
But Western sanctions are shining a light on all his baby-mommas and ex-mistresses, who are living lavish and luxurious lives in the West funded by money stolen from the Russian people.
Here’s a look at the warmonger’s love interests:
Lyudmila Shkrebneva
This Russian flight attendant married Putin in 1983. She was officially the country’s “first lady” when Putin first became president in 2000, but by then they were already leading separate lives.
Their two daughters are now on the sanctions list: Maria Putina, 36, who uses the surname Vorontsova and is the co-owner of Nomenko, a health care investment firm, and Katerina Tikhonova, 35, a former competitive dancer who runs an artificial intelligence initiative at Moscow State University.
Maria was living it up in luxury in the Netherlands, and was dating a Dutch national, Jorrit Faasen, who had a high-paying job linked to Russia’s oil and gas sector. But they were booted out and forced to flee back to Russia in 2014 following Russia’s downing of a Malaysia Airlines flight that left 298 dead — including 193 Dutch people.
Katerina, meanwhile, married Kirill Shamalov in 2013 — and he then became Russia’s youngest billionaire, as a director and part-owner of Sibur, a Russian oil and petrochemical company. They divorced in 2018.
Putin and Lyudmila, meanwhile, didn’t divorce until 2014. She has since remarried and moved to the South of France. Her new husband, Artur Ocheretny, is two decades younger, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Her hubby is also rumored to be a GRU military official tasked with keeping an eye on her, sources say, as she works on projects “promoting Russian language and culture,” under the auspices of the so-called Center for the Development of Interpersonal Communications.
Svetlana Krivonogikh
In 2003, Putin reportedly had a “lovechild” with this housecleaner-turned-mistress who worked at one of his luxury compounds.
Krivonogikh now lives in Monaco, in a $4.1 million apartment bought by a mysterious offshore firm that was exposed in the Pandora Papers last fall — with her 19-year-old daughter, Luiza Rozova, who is also known as Elizaveta Krivonogikh.
Rozova looks strikingly like Putin. In 2020, after Rozova was outed by a Russian website, Proekt, her popularity on social media soared to 85,000 followers.
Rozova posted photos of herself living a life of luxury. Her mother, meanwhile, has a reported $95 million business empire and a yacht that has received a naval escort in St. Petersburg.
She is even a reported co-owner of Bank Rossiya, one of the largest private banks in Russia, founded with money from the Communist Party in the 1990s. After Putin invaded Ukraine, Rozova’s Instagram site was filled with anti-war comments made by users shaming the teen and her war criminal father, and her social media presence was wiped away.
Proekt, the Russian website — the name means Project — was shut down, its journalists were dubbed “foreign agents,” and a libel investigation was launched. The founder, Roman Badanin, was forced to flee and now teaches at Stanford University.
Alina Kabaeva
Putin is believed to have then married this Olympic gymnast and had four children with her — two twin girls and two boys, who were all born in Switzerland.
Kabaeva was apparently Muslim and converted to Russian Orthodoxy for Putin, sources say.
Known as Putin’s “Eva Braun,” Kabaeva and their children are believed to be living in Switzerland. Friends are reportedly urging her to use her influence to stop the war.
Victoria Lopyreva
This alleged mistresses is a Russian TV personality and Miss Russia 2003 who, by 2018, became an official ambassador of the FIFA World Cup and a director of the Miss Russia pageant.
She is now reportedly with a Russian named Igor Bularov.
“The sanctions appear designed to increase pressure on Putin personally by embarrassing him because he has tried so hard to keep his daughters out of the spotlight and also because there is reason to believe that they are holding his wealth,” said Thomas Firestone, a sanctions expert and partner at Stroock & Stroock & Lavan, who previously worked as resident legal adviser to the US Embassy in Moscow. “I think it may also be designed to send a message to him about the kind of intelligence the US and NATO have related to his personal life and are prepared to use.”
