Will Vladimir Putin's empress pay the ultimate price for his war on the West? trends now
Alina Kabaeva could hardly have imagined the life she has been able to build for herself. And right now she will be finding it just as difficult to envisage what the future holds.
The 39-year-old whom some have termed the Empress of Russia lives in boundless luxury, her position secure, it is said, because she has provided Vladimir Putin with the male heir he has so long craved.
Yet she cannot be blind to the fact that, even at the very summit of the Russian kleptocracy, hers remains a highly precarious life. As her children play in the ‘golden mansion’ that is their home in the forests of northern Russia, between Moscow and St Petersburg, they are guarded by a Pantsir air defence system installed in a nearby village.
Because, for better and for worse, Kabaeva’s life is inextricably bound up with that of Putin, the rage-filled 70-year-old Russian president now locked in an existential struggle with the West.
This week, details of Kabaeva’s luxurious existence were laid bare to the world by the independent anti-Putin investigative team Proekt which exposed both the couple’s secret life together and the lavish £100 million property empire that has been assembled for Kabaeva, a former gold medal-winning gymnast.
Early days: Vladimir Putin and Alina Kabaeva in 2004 before their relationship
Glamour: Putin’s mistress posed in furs for a magazine cover in the year she triumphed at the Olympics
Among the revelations was that she has her own luxury ‘wooden mansion’ in a 28-hectare forest estate at Valdai, 250 miles north-west of Moscow and where Putin also has his own ‘royal residence’ along with a number of other VIP estates.
Putin considers his private life sacrosanct. And any attempt to infringe on that is met with swift retaliation. The Moscow newspaper which first exposed his relationship with Kabaeva in 2008, claiming that the couple had become engaged, was closed down within hours.
The Russian leader was also said to be so incensed by this week’s revelations by Proekt that he reportedly swore and yelled at officials in the FSB — the security service that replaced the KGB — whom he blamed for the leak.
He is also said to have argued bitterly with Kabaeva this week, according to General SVR, an account on the encrypted social media site Telegram that claims to have inside knowledge of Putin’s circle. According to the channel, he claimed that her friends ‘talk on every corner about everything they know and don’t know.
‘Putin said that he had 100 per cent information that the leak came from Kabaeva’s circle of friends,’ the channel added. No one had ever seen the President so furious.
‘This was not too far from having a heart attack or a stroke.’
Such are the highs and lows of life for the women who choose to share their lives with the despot President.
Kabaeva took over the role from his previous lover, cleaner-turned-multimillionaire Svetlana Krivonogikh, now 47, who has managed — to a certain extent — to escape Putin’s clutches unscathed.
Krivonogikh is now a shareholder in a major Russian bank and owns sumptuous properties in Monaco and St Petersburg, where she runs the city’s ‘most elite’ strip club, which — rather surprisingly — Putin is said to have recently visited.
Ultimately, Krivonogikh couldn’t provide the male heir Putin so desperately wanted, giving birth to just one child in 2003: a girl named Elizaveta.
Her relationship with Putin reportedly fizzled out some time around 2008.
Similarly, Putin’s ex-wife, the former Aeroflot air stewardess and First Lady Lyudmila Putina, 65, only gave him two daughters. And their strained marriage ended with divorce in 2014.
Above shows the Russian President’s home in Valda
But it seems the glamourous Kabaeva has succeeded where the others failed.
Reports vary as to the number of her children by Putin — but it is at least two and may be as many as four, and could include a set of twins.
The Proekt investigation claims to know the exact ages and names of her children, but has made the decision not to expose them. Yet what’s definitely clear is that at least one of them is a son and heir for Putin.
Her successes as a mother have, Proekt says, therefore seen her rewarded with that £100 million personal property empire, including a Black Sea hideaway in sea-and-ski resort Sochi, as well as around two dozen mansions and flats.
And that’s before you account for the many lavish palaces she and Putin jointly inhabit.
Kabaeva’s homes are decorated in the extravagant and gaudy style that typifies the Russian elite — mahogany, marble, leather and lots of gold. At the snap of her fingers she can summon a fleet of luxury Maybach limousines to convey her and her family retinue, for whom her association with Putin has also proved lucrative. Indeed, her grandmother, Anna Yakovlevna Zatsepilina, has a real estate portfolio worth some £10million and ‘could well be called the richest babushka in all of Russia,’ says Proekt. This is all despite Kabaeva’s relationship with Putin being officially denied from the start, as it still is a decade and a half later.
Are they secretly married? No one knows for sure, though it has been suggested that they tied the knot in an Orthodox church ceremony. Camera crews caught her wearing a ring on her wedding finger in February 2014.
Despite the layers of mystery, over the years Kabaeva has revealed occasional fleeting glimpses of feelings.
She tellingly revealed in 2013 she had met a man that ‘I love
