The US Just Announced Sanctions on Putin’s Daughters

Sanctions just got deeply personal for Russian President Vladimir Putin: The U.S. is blacklisting his two adult daughters. 

The U.S. plans to sanction the two women, Maria Putina and Katerina Tikhonova, because Putin is believed to be hiding his own secret wealth by stashing it away with relatives, a senior administration official told reporters on Wednesday. 

“We believe that many of Putin’s assets are hidden with family members, and that’s why we’re targeting them,” the official, who asked not to be identified by name, told reporters on Wednesday morning. “We have reason to believe that Putin and many of his cronies hide their wealth, hide their assets, with family members, and place their assets or their wealth in the U.S. financial system or elsewhere in the world.”

The decision to sanction Putin’s children smashes through the wall of secrecy that the infamously secretive former KGB man has maintained around them for decades. For years, Putin refused to answer even basic question about his daughters or grandchildren, even while Russian state television hyped his personal life with fawning images of Putin riding bare-chested on horseback. 

Long after he became one of the most-recognizable politicians on Earth, average Russians had no idea what his adult children looked like. 

In the past, journalists who even got a source to acknowledge the identity of one of Putin’s kids treated the achievement as a massive scoop. 

In 2017, the Reuters news agency stunned Russia-watchers by reporting that Tikhonova, who at the time was merely a little-known competitive dancer, was actually Putin’s daughter. 

Tikhonova appears to have been an avid devotee of an obscure form of gymnastic dancing known as acrobatic rock ’n’ roll. 

Her first-ever interview on Russian state television was a puff-piece profile of her work as director of a scientific institute that took place in 2018. In a write-up of the event later, even well-sourced Russian newspaper Vedomosti had to rely on the Reuters report about her possible relationship with Putin. 

Putin’s other daughter, Maria, is reportedly an expert in rare diseases in children as a child endocrinologist. Some press reports indicate that she uses the name Maria Vorontsova, and that she married a Dutch businessman named Jorrit Faassen. But these details remain murky. 

Putin’s kids aren’t the only children of Russia’s elite who are getting sanctioned. The U.S. will also target the wife and daughter of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, the official said on Wednesday. 

Putin has claimed the intense secrecy around his family is all an attempt to bring them up to be relatively normal. In some of his most expansive comments on the subject, during a live call-in show in 2017, Putin said he wanted to let his grandchildren live “ordinary” lives.

“The thing is, you see, I do not want them to grow up like some royal princes,” Putin said. “They need to have a normal environment and ordinary interaction with other children. The minute I give their names and ages, they would be identified immediately and would never be left in peace.”

Putin’s romantic life has also been secretive to the point of being downright weird. 

In 2008, Russian newspaper Moskovsky Korrespondent reported that Putin, then 55, had secretly divorced his wife Lyudmila and planned to marry a 24-year-old Olympic gold medal-winning and outrageously flexible rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabayeva, who was once voted one of Russia’s most beautiful women.

Putin publicly announced his divorce from his wife of three decades in 2013. Bizarrely, he did it during the intermission of a ballet in the Kremlin State Palace. 

Unconfirmed rumors about his relationship with Kabayeva have swirled ever since, although Putin has dismissed them, joking in response that he loves “all Russian women.”