President Putin’s youngest daughter is living in Paris under a pseudonym, it has been alleged, in the latest sign of secrecy shrouding the Russian leader’s family life.
Elizaveta Krivonogikh, 21, a former student and occasional DJ, is the daughter of a woman with whom Putin reportedly had an affair when he was married to Lyudmila Putina.
Krivonogikh uses the name Luiza Rozova, as well as travelling under the name Elizaveta Olegovna Rudnova, according to an investigation by the Ukrainian television station TSN.
Olegovna means “daughter of Oleg”, and Oleg Rudnov, a media manager from St Petersburg, was, before his death in 2015, a close friend of Putin.
Oleg Rudnov, whose name is used in the pseudonym Elizaveta Olegovna Rudnova
WILL STEWART
Using the pseudonym conceals the young woman’s real patronymic, Vladimirovna, or “daughter of Vladimir”.
Investigative reporters have alleged in the past that Rudnov carried out personal tasks for Putin, 72, including purchases of property in St Petersburg for people close to the president such as Svetlana Krivonogikh, Elizaveta’s mother.
The Kremlin has not responded to the report and rarely comments on Putin’s family life.
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The Agentstvo news agency said it had studied leaks of flight data and confirmed that a person named Elizaveta Olegovna Rudnova had the same birth date as Elizaveta Krivonogikh, and used the same telephone number.
Officials in Moscow often rail about the perfidious and morally bankrupt West while their children live privileged lives in Britain, France and other European states.
The daughter of Putin’s wealthy press spokesman Dmitry Peskov also resided in Paris in the past, and the stepdaughter of the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, resided in London.
Officially, Putin has two daughters, named Maria and Katerina, whose mother is Putina, now remarried as Lyudmila Ocheretnaya, from whom the president divorced in 2014. The Kremlin does not acknowledge publicly that they are, as widely reported, Maria Vorontsova, 39, an endocrinologist, and Katerina Tikhonova, 38, a businesswoman.
The British government announced sanctions against Svetlana Krivonogikh, 49, last year for being a shareholder in National Media Group, which “consistently promotes the Russian assault in Ukraine”.
The former economics student who had worked part-time as a cleaner first came to wide public attention in 2020 when the Proekt investigative journalism consortium said she owned property estimated to be worth $100 million, had been “close” to Putin in the late 1990s and early 2000s and had a daughter born in 2003 who looked “phenomenally similar” to the Russian leader.
The Kremlin called that report “gutter press”.
But the anti-corruption foundation of Alexei Navalny, the late Russian opposition leader, alleged in 2021 that Svetlana Krivonogikh had received apartments from Putin’s friends and been given Rossiya Bank shares after their daughter, Elizaveta, was born.
Svetlana Krivonogikh received payments of shares and property after the birth of her daughter, it is alleged
EAST2WEST
Elizaveta Krivonogikh, also known by her nickname, Luiza, was pictured at the time in Instagram posts wearing a Gucci mask and admiring a table full of cocktails and champagne. In 2021 she told a Proekt author in an online chat that she was not disturbed by the attention that had been focused on her. “I’d hit a rut in life,” she said. “Things had stagnated. I’m very grateful that I got this opportunity — that I lit up like this and people saw my account [on Instagram].”
TSN said Krivonogikh had been studying at a management school near the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and received a diploma this year. It is unclear when she moved to France.
It emerged in September that Putin had also fathered two sons in older age, with his long-rumoured girlfriend, the former Olympic gymnast Alina Kabayeva.
They are Ivan, born in 2015, and Vladimir Jr, born in 2019, when Putin was 66, said the Russian-language investigative website the Dossier Centre, which was founded by the formerly jailed oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky.
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The existence of Putin’s sons was revealed to the Dossier Centre by a member of the family’s staff, who care for the brothers at Putin’s isolated Valdai residence, by a lake halfway between Moscow and St Petersburg.
The Dossier Centre said it had obtained dozens of photographs of Ivan but would not publish them because he was a minor whose appearance was not newsworthy. Details of the children’s lives were, however, fair game, the site argued, because they raised questions about government spending on their gilded upbringing.
According to the Dossier Centre’s source, Ivan and Vladimir are tended to by a team of nannies, governesses and sports coaches, travelling by chauffeur-driven cars, yachts and business jets.
The Kremlin called reports that President Putin had been in a relationship with Krivonogikh’s mother “gutter press”
REUTERS
Putin’s relationship with Kabayeva, 41, has been rumoured for more than two decades, but he has always refused to admit it. The pair were pictured beaming at each other at official functions at the turn of the century.
Asked in 2008 about his relationship with the athlete at a press conference in Sardinia, Putin replied: “I am, of course, aware of the cliché that politicians live in glass houses but even in these cases, there must be some limits … I always disliked people who go around with their erotic fantasies, sticking their snot-ridden noses into another person’s life.”
The same year, the newspaper Moskovsky Korrespondent was abruptly closed down after it reported that Kabayeva and Putin were planning marriage.
