Why Putin’s secret sons are the loneliest and most spoilt little boys in the world

Russian dictators have long been a little sensitive where their offspring are concerned. When Joseph Stalin learnt that his teenage daughter Svetlana had a boyfriend, he exiled the poor man to the Arctic Circle.

In his own way, Vladimir Putin is no less ­controlling. His fathering of two sons has only now been revealed after the pair spent years as a closely guarded state secret.

A Russian investigative journalism website has announced that the two young Putins are his children by former Olympic gold medal-winning rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabaeva, a glamorous 41-year-old who was once ­convicted of doping and whose romantic relationship with the Russian leader has been an open secret in his country for at least 16 years.

According to The Dossier Center, the offspring of this long-time clandestine relationship are Ivan, nine, and Vladimir Jr, five. They spend most of their time at Putin’s heavily guarded mansion near Lake Valdai, north-west of Moscow, where they live a life of luxury in near-total isolation.

Alina Kabaeva is a glamorous 41-year-old who was once ­convicted of doping and whose romantic relationship with Vladimir Putin has been an open secret in his country for at least 16 years

Kabaeva had Putin’s first child, Ivan, at a private clinic in Lugano, Switzerland, in 2015

Instead of playmates their own age, the cocooned pair are ‘accompanied round the clock by nannies, governesses and personal trainers’ and protected by officers of the Kremlin’s Federal Protective Service. They’ve never been to school and are instead educated by a squad of personal tutors.

For the young Putins, the danger of kicking their football into the neighbour’s garden has been replaced by the threat of it being instantly obliterated by a rocket – the Valdai residence is protected by a high-tech air defence system that was installed following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Neither boy can be found on any official database and, since birth, they ‘have had the kind of cover documents typically made for spies and people under state protection’, reports The Dossier Center. ‘Only close relatives know their birth dates.’

Kabaeva had Putin’s first child, Ivan, at a private clinic in Lugano, Switzerland, in 2015. The same Russian-born female gynaecologist who delivered the boy later travelled to Moscow to assist at the second birth in 2019.

The doctor, Natalya Thiebaud, died last year aged 63, in unexplained circumstances.

The children, Ivan, nine, and Vladimir Jr, five, spend most of their time at Putin’s heavily guarded mansion near Lake Valdai, north-west of Moscow

The new report, which was compiled with the help of an insider at the residence who sees the pair ­regularly, provides extraordinary detail about the boys’ lives, an existence for which the phrase ‘velvet-lined coffin’ seems apt. They are drowning in expensive toys and pets but have nobody but each other and the no doubt terrified household grown-ups to play with them. They have, for instance, an ‘extensive collection of Lego sets’, an iPad and an animal menagerie that includes two ponies, a St Bernard dog and rabbits.

Ivan is reportedly a fan of Disney cartoons and films, and loves dressing up as his favourite characters.

This amounts to an unconscious act of rebellion, as his father has nothing but contempt for Western cartoons, preferring the less violent and ‘aesthetically superior’ animations of his own Soviet childhood.

‘They have to play mostly alone or with adults,’ says the report. ‘They only see their parents late at night.’ It added diplomatically: ‘But they cherish the rare moments they spend with their father.’

Putin reportedly plays ice hockey with his elder son at a purpose-built rink near the house but, if they ever compete in matches, they are always on the same team.

Mealtimes sound similarly indulgent but sterile. Their personal chefs cook separate dishes for them and, like their father – who is reportedly obsessed with the threat of being poisoned – they drink only from their personal mugs.

They have their own waiters, too, just one ­element of a staff that is said to be ‘dozens strong’.

According to the insider, they are kept to a strict daily regime. They breakfast between 8am and 9am with their teachers and nannies. The staff includes four nannies, some of whom were previously the Putin compound’s cleaners, who work in 12-hour shifts and who, as the children grew up, were replaced by governesses.

The boys eat lunch at noon, then take a nap before more lessons and sports in the afternoon. They have their own gym and swimming pool, with personal coaches for both activities.

Ivan’s gym teacher is a former member of the Russian national team, although the boy’s achievements are described as ‘modest’.

They’re picked up by their drivers after 8pm and taken back to their family residence where they go straight to bed. According to the report, ‘the brothers have their own cars with drivers and teachers and staff have separate vehicles’.

Other children, generally belonging to friends of the boys’ mother, have been seen at the Valdai mansion but, like everyone else visiting the family of a reputed hypochondriac autocrat, they must first go into quarantine for two weeks.

This stipulation tallies with Putin’s insistence, first adopted during the pandemic, that anyone wanting to meet him must be isolated for a fortnight first. Spontaneous play dates are clearly not an option.

Like the offspring of so many wealthy people, the boys have learnt to ski. In their case, however, this means entirely relocating every February and March to another tightly protected but luxurious home near the fashionable Krasnaya Polyana resort in the Caucasus Mountains. They only ever travel anywhere by private jet or armoured train.

The young princes while away July and August on luxury yachts, or more accurately a ‘fleet’ of vessels, which – since the Ukraine war started – stay out of reach of Western navies in the Gulf of Finland and on the Black Sea coast.

The boys have their own gym and swimming pool, with personal coaches for both activities

Their teachers come, too, quartered along with their other staff on a support vessel where the boys are ferried for lessons.

Their studies include music, chess, English and German, while – in an apparent acknowledgement that the news of their existence was about to break – Putin told schoolchildren in Siberia this week: ‘Members of my family, the little ones, speak Chinese.’

He and the children’s mother reportedly advertised surreptitiously for a live-in English teacher this year via Moscow’s English Nanny agency, which finds household staff for wealthy oligarchs.

The advert, which offered a monthly salary of £6,500 for a 60-hour working week teaching ‘English and other subjects’, predictably didn’t identify the clients. But it warned prospective applicants they would be living in isolation and would have to undergo the telling two weeks’ quarantine before starting work.

Putin and his wife reportedly once preferred to recruit teachers from the UK and New Zealand but, since the Ukraine ­crisis, have looked instead to countries more sympathetic to Russia. (The latest advert said they preferred a South African.)

While working at the Lake Valdai mansion, staff are not allowed to leave the grounds but can use the gym and tennis courts.

They live in separate accommodation ‘within walking distance’ of the family home.

A source said staff turnover among the boys’ teachers and governesses was high because ‘it’s not easy to get along with the family’.

Not that Putin and their mother appear to have direct contact with their children’s carers, leaving this to go-betweens.

Bizarrely, one of these intermediaries is allegedly a ‘stand-in mother… who communicates with the governesses and nannies, pretending Kabaeva’s sons are her children’.

What the young boys make of this is anyone’s guess.

When Ivan plays ice hockey, this go-between comes to cheer him on while his real mother is said to watch invisible to prying eyes from behind a one-way screen.

Although this cosseted pair are Putin’s only known male offspring, he has at least three daughters. His two adult daughters with his ex-wife, Lyudmila, are Maria Vorontsova, 39, an endocrinologist, and Katerina Tikhonova, 38, a technology company executive and former ‘acrobatic rock ‘n’ roll dancer’.

An insider told investigators that Putin utterly indulged his daughters, adding that if he’d been ‘directly involved’ in raising the boys, ‘they would probably be terribly spoiled because everything would be allowed’.

He and Lyudmila married in 1983 when she was a flight attendant and he a KGB officer. While she was with him as he climbed the greasy pole, she once admitted she cried when he became president. ‘My private life ended with all this,’ she said.

In 2013, she publicly admitted that their marriage was over as they hardly saw each other because he was ‘completely absorbed’ in his work. Their divorce was announced the following year.

By then, Putin already had at least one secret love-child, Luiza Rozova, now 21, from an affair with a cleaner called Svetlana Krivonogikh shortly before he became Russia’s president in 2000. Now 49, she is a multimillionaire whose business empire includes a major Russian bank as well as a strip club. Putin has long denied any romantic relationship with Kabaeva, who is 30 years younger than him.

The boys live a life of luxury in near-total isolation at the mansion. Staff are not allowed to leave the grounds but can use the gym and tennis courts

A room said to be Vladimir Putin’s bedroom at Valdai residence

Indeed, he is so touchy about it that, when a newspaper reported in 2008 that he had secretly divorced his wife and become engaged to Kabaeva, not only did Putin and Kabaeva both deny the story, he had the paper closed down overnight. He also lambasted the investigators with ‘their erotic fantasies, [who] interfere in other people’s lives’.

But why such intense secrecy about the boys? Russia’s historic tsars – to whom Putin often likes to compare himself – were open about their own offspring even if their Soviet successors were not.

Russia experts cite various reasons for Putin’s behaviour, starting with the instinctive caginess of an ex-spook who spent years working for the KGB.

Second is his obsessive sensitivity about anything to do with his relationship with Kabaeva, who some believe he secretly married as long ago as 2008.

After winning a gold medal at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, she retired from gymnastics and served two years in the lower house of Russia’s parliament as a representative of Putin’s United Russia party.

Along with several members of Putin’s family, she was sanctioned by the UK in 2022.

Finally, there is the question of security, which has become a more pressing issue for Putin since he ordered the Ukraine invasion and made ­himself more liable not only to assassination attempts but to international detention on war crimes charges.

Alina Kabaeva performs during a gymnastic gala at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games

During the years he spent courting Western friendship, Putin was far more open about his family. When he visited the UK with Lyudmila to meet then prime minister Tony Blair not long after he first becoming president, they reportedly took their two daughters, who even played with the Blair children.

However, Putin later became far more secretive about the daughters: when they reached adulthood, they adopted new names that have never been officially disclosed and effectively went into hiding.

The fact that the children he’s chosen to protect most intensively are both male may also be important. There have been ­suggestions that Putin is ­grooming Ivan to succeed him – although given he’s 71 and Ivan not yet ten, it seems implausible that even Putin, fixated as he is with holding on to his power and wealth, believes such a handover is possible.

The Dossier Center was launched in 2017 by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once Russia’s ­richest man before he fell out with Putin and spent nearly a decade in a Russian prison for financial offences.

He was pardoned in 2013 but the investigative organisation he set up has earned a reputation for uncovering the secrets of Russia’s notoriously corrupt cadre of senior government officials.

Meanwhile, young Ivan is reported to have repeatedly told his tutors and security guards that Putin was so happy when he was born that he shouted: ‘Hurray! Finally! A boy!’

Ordinary Russians, whose own sons Putin has happily sent off to be massacred in Ukraine in their tens of thousands, can be forgiven for being rather less euphoric at this week’s revelations.

Additional reporting: Will Stewart