Since the start of the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has been hit by an unprecedented number of sanctions, many of them targeting the federation’s ruling elite.
These sanctions are intended to punish the kleptocracy behind the war by cutting off access to wealth, property and luxury properties. The families of Putin’s closest allies also felt the strain as the lifestyles of the “Kremlin children” (the children of the elite) became public knowledge. The phrase was used by analysts Agnieszka Leguchka and Bartosz Beliszczuk of the Polish Institute of International Relations to describe the second generation of Kremlin-linked oligarchs.
Last year, the US and European countries imposed sanctions on a number of Russian influential figures, including Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, Putin himself, Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov, and others.
Offspring of oligarchs often receive education and live in Western countries without losing the privileges of their influential parents, even though Russia condemns Western values. This is “one of the issues that clearly illustrates the hypocrisy of the Russian political elite,” believes Dinisa Duvanova, a professor of international relations at Lee University.
“Anti-Western propaganda is a convenient brainwashing tool used by the ideological state apparatus to justify the rejection of democracy, external aggression and the denial of human rights and other values associated with Western liberal democracies,” says Duvanova, who adds that the oligarchs want to continue robbing Russia so their families can live safe and privileged lives outside the country.
“Russians are being asked to support Putin’s corrupt regime because, according to propaganda, the West is undermining Russia culturally, economically and militarily,” she said.
Who are the “children of the Kremlin?”
Elizabeth Peskova
Peskova is the daughter of Dmitry Sergeevich Peskov, Putin’s deputy chief of staff and chief spokesman, from his second marriage. The 24-year-old Peskova also ventures as “Lisa” on social networks, where she publicly spoke out against the war on her well-organized Instagram page. Peskova has tens of thousands of followers on social networks.
According to the Washington Post, Peskova began attending the Ecole des Roches near Paris in 2010, and in 2019 she interned at the luxury fashion brand Louis Vuitton and with Aymeric Choprade, a far-right member of the European Parliament. She received a degree in marketing from a French business school.
The anti-corruption foundation, founded by Putin’s nemesis Alexei Navalny in 2011, found that Peskova and her mother bought an apartment in one of Paris’ most expensive neighborhoods worth nearly $2 million in 2016, according to CNN report.
Peskova was briefly engaged to French businessman Louis Waldberg.
Nicholas Choles
The life of Peskov’s eldest son, Nikolai Peskov, or Nikolai Choles, was documented on Navalny’s blog in 2017. Choles moved to live in Britain with his mother, who was also Peskov’s first wife, in the early 90s years, but returned to Russia about a decade ago to serve in the military, according to the Treasury Department. He used his English stepfather’s surname.
In his blog, Navalny wrote that Choles “is an example of how in Russia, where 20 million people live below the poverty line, where 70% of residents dream of a salary of 45,000 rubles, you can live perfectly to your heart’s content. At the most high level. And without doing ANYTHING. And if you do, then sit on the neck of the taxpayer”.
According to CNN, Peskov’s son is unemployed but travels on private jets. According to Navalny’s blog, he has accumulated at least 116 traffic violations.
Navalny wrote that Choles also did not pay alimony for his daughter, but in 2017 he owned an apartment in the center of Moscow worth 25-30 million rubles.
Polina Kovaleva
Kovaleva is Lavrov’s “stepdaughter”. Her parents never married. At age 21, Kovaleva bought a $5.8 million apartment in London’s Kensington neighborhood, according to Navalny’s blog.
Kovaleva enrolled at Imperial College London, according to CNN.
Ekaterina Vinokurova
Lavrov’s daughter Ekaterina Vinokourova, 39, lived in New York for 17 years and attended Columbia University. Vinokourova graduated from the London School of Economics.
Ksenia Frank and Natalia Browning
Frank and Browning are the daughters of Gennady Timchenko, a close ally of Putin and owner of Transoil, Russia’s largest private rail operator in the transportation of oil and petroleum products.
Frank, 37, Timchenko’s youngest daughter, is a citizen of Finland and lives in Switzerland with her husband, Gleb Frank, according to Bloomberg.
Frank graduated from the University of Edinburgh, where she studied French and Philosophy, and was a board member of Transoil. She received an MBA from INSEAD, the European Institute of Business Management, which is her husband’s alma mater.
Frank now heads the supervisory board named after her father and his wife Elena.
Browning, 43, is the eldest of Timchenko’s three children (one son, Ivan, escaped sanctions, according to Insider.) She graduated from Oxford University in England, where she studied English literature, according to RFE/RL.
Browning used her previous married surname. In 2002, she married an Oxford student named Peter Browning, according to RFE/RL.
In 2010, Browning reportedly founded a film production company, Step Productions LLC. It was transferred to another person in 2020.
Putin’s daughters
Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova and Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova are Putin’s adult daughters. Tikhonova, 35, is the head of a technology department whose work supports the government of the Russian Federation and the defense industry, according to the Ministry of Finance.
Vorontsova, 36, is a medical specialist who runs state-funded programs personally controlled by Putin. According to the Treasury Department, the programs received billions of dollars from the Kremlin for genetic research. She is registered as a pediatric endocrinologist at the Endocrinological Research Center in Moscow.
Vorontsova reportedly lived in a $3.3 million apartment in the Netherlands with her husband, Dutch businessman Jorit Jost Faasen. The BBC identified her as a co-owner of a company that plans to build a large medical center.
An eight-bedroom villa in Biarritz, France, said to have been bought by Tikhonova’s ex-husband, Kiril Shamalov, has been attacked by activists and offered as a haven for Ukrainian refugees.
A 2015 Reuters investigation found Tikhonova and Shamalov’s corporate assets to be worth about $2 billion.
In 2015, the BBC reported that Putin said: “My daughters live in Russia and studied only in Russia, I am proud of them … They speak three foreign languages fluently. I never discuss my family with anyone.”
According to CNN, Putin has more illegitimate children hidden in Western countries.
This includes Alina Kabaeva. A former Russian gymnast who won Olympic medals before entering politics, Kabaeva reportedly had at least a ten-year relationship with Putin since 2008 and became extremely wealthy. “Billions of stolen money were spent to support yet another Putin wife,” according to the 2021 investigation into jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, which included a two-hour documentary and a 14,000-word report. His anti-corruption fund also alleged that Kabaeva officially received a salary of 785 million rubles – about $10.7 million a year in 2019 – from Putin’s banker Yuriy Kovalchuk.
Who is sanctioned?
Tikhonova and Vorontsova have been sanctioned by the United States and the United Kingdom.
Kovaleva and Vinokourova were also sanctioned by the UK, and Peskova and Choles were sanctioned by the US in March along with their father and Peskov’s wife, Tatyana Alexandrovna Navka.
The State Department announced the sanctions against Browning and Frank on March 24.
Kabaeva has not been sanctioned, and Putin’s ex-wife Lyudmila is yet to worry about sanctions. Ludmila has a villa in the south of France worth $4 million, as well as other properties and assets in Europe.
