The youngest daughter of Russian President Katerina Tikhonova is in a relationship with the famous ballet dancer Igor Zelensky, who worked in Germany in recent years, and they have a daughter born in 2017, Russian and German investigative journalists concluded. Earlier, the media claimed that the eldest daughter of Vladimir Putin, Maria Vorontsova, had a new partner and a child from him.

The media, citing a joint investigation of “Important Stories” (the publication is recognized in Russia as an undesirable organization and an organization that performs the functions of a “foreign agent”) and Der Spiegel write that after parting with her first husband Kirill Shamalov, deputy chairman of the board of Sibur, Katerina Tikhonova began dating 52-year-old Igor Zelensky, now a former artistic director of the Bavarian State Ballet.

In April this year, he left the post – apparently because of the unwillingness to publicly condemn the war against Ukraine, follows from the investigation.

Firstly, the list of passengers of the flight, which landed at the VIP terminal of Vnukovo airport on December 9, 2019, was at the disposal of investigative journalists, the Agency writes. According to them, on board the plane were Tikhonova, Zelensky, their daughter, who by that time was two years old, as well as two nannies, a piano teacher and three employees of the Security Service of the President of Russia acting as a foreign agent). The authors state that the list of passengers was given to them by a source at the airport.

Secondly, the authors of the investigation claim that they have data on Tikhonova’s flights, from which it follows that over the past two years she has flown to Munich, where Zelensky worked, more than 50 times.

The third source is an anonymous source who, about two years ago, sent an archive of letters from Tikhonova’s ex-husband Shamalov to the editors of Important Stories. Now this anonymous source has handed over to the investigators files, which the authors refer to as documents from the e-mails of an employee of the Presidential Security Service and personal bodyguard Tikhonova (his name is mentioned in the investigation). These documents allegedly contain copies of the passports of Putin’s daughter, Igor Zelensky, and a girl born in 2017. Her patronymic is Igorevna. To all of them, Tikhonova’s security guard bought air tickets, according to the investigation.

Finally, fourthly, when asked about Zelensky, a Der Spiegel source at the Bavarian State Ballet replied that he was “most likely a partner of Putin’s daughter,” although journalists did not even have time to ask about it.

Investigators were unable to establish when and under what circumstances Tikhonova and Zelensky met. They can only claim that Putin’s youngest daughter has been flying to Munich frequently since 2017. Zelensky did not answer phone calls.

Zelensky is a Soviet and Russian ballet dancer and choreographer, he is 52 years old and has been Artistic Director of the Bavarian State Ballet since 2016. Since the early 1990s, he has worked in New York, Berlin, London and other major venues in the world. He was the artistic director of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theater – until the summer of 2016.

Since 2018, he has been a member of the Supervisory Board of the National Cultural Heritage Foundation, which is building large cultural and educational complexes in Russia. As the BBC wrote, this idea belonged to Putin personally. The foundation was established by the Bolshoi Theatre, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Hermitage and the Mariinsky Theater in the same 2018. The construction contractor was the Stroygazmontazh company of Arkady Rotenberg, who had long known Putin.

In the future, Zelensky is likely to head the opera and ballet theater under construction in Sevastopol, a project personally announced by Putin in 2018, Meduza writes in its investigation, also released on Thursday. According to the publication, close communication with Tikhonova began, presumably, when Zelensky directed the troupe at the Moscow Musical Theater. Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko (he worked there in 2011-2016). Interlocutors of Meduza claim that they were seen together after the performances.

In early April, Meduza and Current Time (both publications are in the Russian register of “foreign agents”) released an investigation according to which 34-year-old Moscow manager Yevgeny Nagorny became the new common-law husband of the eldest daughter of the Russian president, Maria Vorontsova.

The authors claimed that 42-year-old Dutch citizen Jorrit Faassen, whom the media called Putin’s son-in-law, is no longer in a relationship with Vorontsova, but after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he decided to stay in Moscow, effectively abandoning his homeland.

They concluded that Vorontsova was in a relationship with Nagorny based on photographs from her friend’s wedding and data from the air travel database. The authors claimed that the couple has a child who travels the world with his parents and bears his father’s surname.

Nagorny, according to them, studied at the customs department of the Moscow Financial and Law University, worked at the customs broker of Rosoboronexport, and then became the chief specialist at the Eurochem company. They also claimed that after entering into a relationship with Vorontsova, Nagorny became the manager of the Novatek company, co-owned by Putin’s friend Gennady Timchenko. They also noted that before meeting with the president’s daughter, he was interested in the opposition agenda, but then abandoned his views.

Vorontsova’s surname surfaced in the media and social networks this week, when journalist Dmitry Kolezev received screenshots from an unnamed source from a chat of graduates of the Faculty of Fundamental Medicine of Moscow State University, which, according to Reuters, Vorontsova graduated in 2011. The source suggested that chat user Maria V, a graduate of 2011, is Putin’s eldest daughter.

In this chat, judging by the screenshots, they often discuss near-political topics, and now they often talk about the war in Ukraine, wrote Kolezev. According to him, Maria V is an active participant in many disputes: “Judging by her messages, copies of which the interlocutor gave me, she does not directly approve of the war, but generally supports the official Russian narrative, according to which Russia is not an aggressor, but a victim” .

“When it comes to the chat about the president’s personal responsibility for what happened, Maria V suggests not blaming one person and assures that the United States and the West are trying to weaken Russia and turn Russia into a raw materials appendage,” the journalist described the point of view of Putin’s alleged daughter.

Both of Putin’s adult daughters are under US, Canadian, EU, UK, Australian and New Zealand sanctions. The US Treasury indicated “Shamalova” as other possible names for Tikhonova, and in the case of Vorontsova – “Faassen” and “Putina”, the media noted.

Last week, on May 13, Britain was the first Western country to sanction famed gymnast Alina Kabaeva, including her among other members of the Putin family. Lyudmila Putina (Ocheretnaya), the former wife of the President of Russia, as well as the grandmother of Kabaeva, also fell under the sanctions.

Prior to this, the American Wall Street Journal published an investigation that the Russian president has three children from Kabaeva, and the United States considered imposing sanctions against her, but “at the last minute” abandoned this idea in order not to “anger” Putin.

Putin neither confirmed nor denied that Vorontsova and Tikhonov were his daughters. In early April, his press secretary Dmitry Peskov, answering a question about American sanctions against them, said that it was “difficult to understand and explain” the application of “some kind of restrictions” to family members.

The Kremlin did not comment on sanctions against Kabaeva and relations with Putin. But just a few minutes after the name appeared on the British sanctions list, the Russian Foreign Ministry recommended that Russian citizens refrain from traveling to the UK and trying to obtain visas from this country.

BBC Russian Service correspondent Andrey Zakharov on why information about Putin’s relatives is important

In world journalism, there are two main discourses on covering the personal lives of political leaders. The first one says: this information is of public interest only if members of the family of prime ministers or presidents use their position to enrich themselves. The second is usually referred to as “yellow”: any news from the life of the leader of the country is interesting, even if his wife, relatively speaking, was seen drunk on the street.

Putin carefully conceals information about his family. But what is learned almost always belongs to the domain of the first discourse. One of his daughters, Katerina Tikhonova, heads the Innopraktika scientific foundation, which receives numerous subsidies from the state and government agencies.

As I was able to establish, together with colleagues on the recognized undesirable “Project”, the mother of his alleged third daughter, Svetlana Krivonogikh, is a shareholder in Rossiya Bank, which the US authorities called the bank of the president’s inner circle.

The same is with Alina Kabaeva: she heads the board of directors of the National Media Group, the main shareholder of which is the same bank Rossiya. NMG owns several popular TV channels, including a stake in Channel One. True, after the start of the war with Ukraine, the information that Kabaeva works there disappeared from the holding’s website.

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