In June, RFE/RL's Russian Service reported that satellite images showed the Valdai resort residence of President Vladimir Putin had been fortified with antiaircraft defenses, apparently intended to protect the lavish estate from Ukrainian drones.
The lakeside home, about halfway between St. Petersburg and Moscow and a 20-minute helicopter jaunt from the Kremlin, is the primary residence of Putin's two young sons, according to a report by the Dossier Center, an investigative news outlet funded by exiled former oil tycoon and vocal Putin critic Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Journalists have long reported that Putin had two sons with former Olympic gymnast and State Duma Deputy Alina Kabayeva, but the Dossier report, based largely on interviews with a source who lived and worked in the residence and who regularly interacted with the two boys, goes much further.
Putin, 71, and the Kremlin have been tight-lipped about the president's family throughout his decades in power. During a televised press conference in 2015, Putin said: "I never discuss my family with anyone. Every person has a right to their fate. They live their own lives and do it with dignity."
Retired gymnast Alina Kabayeva attends a sports event in Kazan in June
Earlier this month, however, during a visit to the Tyva region, Putin made an unusual comment while visiting a local school.
"Some of my family members, the little ones, speak Chinese too -- they speak it fluently," the president said. It was unclear if he was referring to the three grandchildren he reportedly has from the two daughters of his marriage to Lyudmila Putina, which ended in divorce in 2014, or his reported sons with Kabayeva, 41, who were born in 2015 and 2019.
The Daughters
Putin's eldest daughter, Maria, was born in Leningrad in 1985 and is currently 39. Although Putin has not confirmed the reports, she has been identified as endocrinologist Maria Vladimirovna Vorontseva. She has been heavily involved in a state-funded oncology center outside St. Petersburg as a major shareholder of a company called Nomeko that manages the $634 million project.
Putin's youngest daughter, Yekaterina, was born in Dresden, in then-East Germany, in 1986 and is now 38. Reporters have identified her as Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova, a former acrobatic dancer who heads a state-funded business incubator under the auspices of Moscow State University. She is also deputy director of the university's Institute for Mathematical Research of Complex Systems. From 2013 to 2018, she was married to billionaire businessman Kirill Shamalov.
The Sons
Even before Putin's divorce from Lyudmila in 2014, the president had been romantically linked to Kabayeva since 2008.
In 2020, the Russian publication The Insider reported that the chief gynecologist-obstetrician of the Health Ministry, Leila Adamyan, and her daughter had been registered as the owners of elite Moscow real estate worth about 1 billion rubles ($11 million). The purchase came months after Kabayeva reportedly gave birth at Moscow's Kulakov National Medical Research Center for Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Perinatology, where Adamyan worked. Investigative journalist Sergei Kanev reported at the time that the hospital had been thoroughly searched and secured by agents of the Federal Protection Service (FSO), which is the Russian analogue of the U.S. Secret Service.
On May 23, 2019, two weeks after Kabayeva gave birth, Putin personally awarded Adamyan the order For Service to the Fatherland, Second Class, at a lavish Kremlin ceremony.
According to the Dossier report, Putin's first son with Kabayeva, Ivan, was born in 2015, while his younger son, Vladimir, was born in 2019. The Dossier Center said it had obtained photographs of the boys but had decided not to release them to protect the minors.
"They don't spend much time with their parents," Ilya Rozhdestvensky, the lead investigator in the Dossier report, told RFE/RL's Russian Service. "According to our information, about 30 to 60 minutes a day.... To some extent, nannies replace their parents, having breakfast with them and teaching them and exercising with them."
Nonetheless, Rozhdestvensky added, Ivan, in particular, is very fond of Putin.
"The son cherishes their play together and their joint hockey matches," he explained. "The sons play on one team with Vladimir Putin against FSO agents. Ivan has repeatedly told the servants a story that, apparently, his parents told him about how when he was born, his father was so happy that he shouted: 'Hurrah! Finally, a son!'"
Rozhdestvensky added that both boys are studying English and German.
"It is possible they are being prepared for athletic careers," he added. "They have professional coaches, one in gymnastics and another in swimming. They have a chess tutor. The older son is also studying academic subjects."
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'Crown Princes'
The Dossier Center's insider source directed them to an advertisement that appeared earlier this year on the website of the elite employment agency English Nanny, a company that recruits domestic help for wealthy people from Russia, Kazakhstan, China, and elsewhere. The ad sought a "live-in English teacher for two children aged 4 and 8 years old in the St. Petersburg region."
"The family lives in isolation," the ad, which offered a monthly salary of 7,700 euros ($8,500), read. It added that the tutor would "work in isolation" and "not leave the employer's territory."
According to the Dossier report, the employees in the house are reluctant to discipline the children or impose restrictions, and the boys are growing up with a profound sense of entitlement in an atmosphere of private jets and yachts. Before Moscow's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, they regularly spent time with Kabayeva aboard the Russian president's $119 million, 82-meter yacht Graceful, Dossier reported.
Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina on the day of their wedding in July 1983
"If from their very birth everyone is running around them and fulfilling their every whim and acting like they are crown princes...then it is no surprise that they take everything around them for granted," Rozhdestvensky said.
Russian journalist Konstantin Eggert, who works for Deutsche Welle, said Putin's sons "are living exactly like the children of Russia's imperial family lived, except in a more closed spiritual and physical space."
"It is obvious that they think of themselves as a new nobility, a new aristocracy," Eggert said. "They rule Russia exactly as it was ruled in the age of serfdom...."
"The lives of these new noblemen compared to the mass shelling of...Ukrainian cities is the monstrous contrast of our times," he added. "Of course, it is a sign of the moral decay of the Russian elite and the indifference of Russian society. It says a lot about the moral crisis of Russia. The fate of these two boys is just part of the huge landscape of this monstrous crisis, which has been developing for years."