Her parents own prime properties on the most exclusive streets of European capitals. Her social media profiles are filled with designer dresses and red carpet events. A young woman posted photos of her 22nd birthday by the pool at the Adriatic villa of one of Putin’s oligarchs.
Meet the children of the Kremlin.
While their parents publicly rail against the West, their children are growing up in the very countries whose societies they are said to reject.
“This is obviously extreme hypocrisy,” said Daniel Treisman, a professor of Russian politics at the University of California, Los Angeles.
“You might not even see a contradiction,” Treisman said. “You think there’s this competition between the US and Russia, but why should that affect your daughter’s education plans? Or where they have their locks?”
In a speech last month, Putin himself blasted Russians who might “mentally” ally themselves with the West, accusing them of being part of a “higher race” and working with the “collective West” towards one goal: “destruction of Russia. ”
“The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and just spit them out like a mosquito that accidentally got into their mouths,” Putin said.
One of the first families of alleged Russian corruption and hypocrisy is that of Vladimir Putin’s deputy chief of staff and chief spokesman Dmitry Peskov – a role that makes him Putin’s loudest mouthpiece, one who dished out the Russian president’s harsh poison against the West on an almost daily basis.
The United States recently sanctioned Peskov, his wife and two adult children (from two previous marriages), stating that the family “lives a luxurious lifestyle incompatible with Peskov’s civil servant salary and likely built on the ill-gotten wealth of Peskov’s connections with Putin.” .” At least two of his children grew up mostly in New York Western Europe before returning to Moscow as adults. While the US Treasury Department didn’t spell out the questionable excesses, Peskov – who has held the role for nearly a decade and reportedly earned $173,000 in 2020 – was spotted with a $600,000 designer watch and gone on a honeymoon, which included a roughly $430,000-a-week yacht off the coast of Sardinia, according to an investigation by the anti-corruption foundation set up by jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.
Based on property records, social media posts and traffic violation databases, the Anti-Corruption Foundation also revealed that Peskov’s wife, ex-wife and children own luxury vehicles and Multimillion dollar homes around the world – including Russia and France – a display of wealth in stark contrast to the nearly 20 million Russians living in poverty.
The amazing but seemingly inexplicable wealth of such families in Putin’s world, experts say, boils down to a single concept: kleptocracy.
“A kleptocracy is just a government run by thieves,” said Jodi Vittori, a professor at Georgetown University, an expert on corruption and global politics, “where the policies and decisions are made on behalf of those thieves.”
An intricate web of shell companies, offshore banks and hidden transactions often obscures their wealth, with accounts that are intertwined, making it difficult to trace where the funds are coming from.
The wealth amassed by Russian kleptocrats is often spent in Western economies.
“They want to live in the West because the richest countries in the world are in the West. The amazing cultural centers are in the West,” said Treisman. “But also, Western countries have a much more secure rule of law than Russia. So if they can get a lot of money into the West, they can feel safer.”
The hypocrisy of Russian officials and their families, who enjoy the generosity of the West, has been an open secret in Russia for years. In 2016, the State Duma was presented with a bill banning the education of underage children of most Russian officials at foreign universities, claiming that native education is the key to becoming true patriots. The bill didn’t add up.
Peskov’s 24-year-old daughter from a second marriage, Elizaveta Peskova — whose racy social media posts have often become fodder for Russian and European tabloids — hasn’t shied away from the limelight or controversy, like when she reportedly told a Russian TV channel that she “feels better in the European environment” and named Russia’s education system a “true hell”.
More recently, she contradicted her father’s public statements by posting “No to war,” the slogan used by the Russians against the war in Ukraine, on her Instagram Stories. The post was Screenshot and shared by Russian outlet TV Rain, but was quickly removed.
As a young child, Peskova reportedly attended Ecole des Roches outside Paris – where annual tuition is about a quarter of her father’s salary and extracurricular activities include flying lessons.
Peskova continued her Parisian education with an internship at Louis Vuitton and a marketing degree from a French business school. She even did an internship for the European Parliament.
According to the Anti-Corruption Foundation, in 2016 Peskova and her mother bought a nearly $2 million, 180-square-foot apartment in one of Paris’ most expensive neighborhoods, on Avenue Victor Hugo, sandwiched between the Eiffel Tower and the Arc de Triomphe and the lush Bois de Boulogne. CNN has not confirmed the purchase. Peskova’s extravagance in France matches that of her half-brother in Russia. A 2017 investigation by Navalny’s anti-corruption group found Nikolay Choles – Peskov’s eldest son, who grew up in England — traveled the world in private jets, owned prime real estate in Moscow and sped around the city in his fleet of luxury vehicles, allegedly causing up to 116 traffic violations while out of work.
“It certainly represents a high level of at least cynicism, if not outright hypocrisy,” said Vittori, a Georgetown professor.
Peskova called the sanctions and the notion that they somehow make war possible “completely unfair and unfounded,” and told Business Insider she was “upset” that the restrictions are preventing her from traveling. In a statement on Telegram, Peskova wrote that she was “proud” to be Russian and that it was “crazy” to sanction adult children and “especially a girl”. “There is hardly a fair trial,” she added, “with such a witch hunt and a raging hatred of everything Russian.”
Peskova — who, when reached by CNN, didn’t dive into the details of this story at the time of publication — isn’t the only Kremlin-linked kid enjoying continental high society.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who called for a “post-Western” world order in 2017, sent his daughter to prestigious universities in London and New York.
Even the daughter of Lavrov’s alleged girlfriend seems to be benefiting from his influential position: she posted pictures of herself at the yacht, the Austrian ski resort and the beach villa of a wealthy oligarch, according to the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Polina Kovaleva – who the British government has dubbed Lavrov’s “stepdaughter” despite not being officially married to her mother – owns a $5.8 million flat in one of London’s most expensive areas, as revealed by recent sanctions imposed on her emerges.
The Anti-Corruption Foundation announced that Kovaleva bought the Kensington apartment when she was 21 years old. The apartment is walking distance from Imperial College, which she also attended.
Lavrov’s much less visible daughter, Ekaterina Vinokurova, now 39, attended Columbia University in New York, where she lived for 17 years, before graduating from the London School of Economics. Both Kovaleva and Vinokurova were recently sanctioned by the UK.
“This is a strong signal that those who benefit from uniting those responsible for Russian aggression fall within the scope of our sanctions,” wrote British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss a press release Announcement of sanctions against Kovaleva.
Putin himself is no exception to the hypocrisy of harsh anti-Western rhetoric in the face of family members or those close to him taking advantage of what the West has to offer.
One of his alleged partners, who is said to have given birth to a daughter, became the owner of a $4.1 million apartment in Monaco just weeks after the child was born, according to an investigation by independent Russian media outlet Proekt, which pointed to the so-called Pandora papers based.
His eldest daughter Maria is said to have married a Dutch businessman; The couple are said to have lived in a $3.3 million apartment in the Netherlands. An eight bedroom villa in Biarritz, France, which is linked to his younger daughter Katerina — the multimillion-dollar mansion bought by her former husband Kirill Shamalov from Putin’s longtime friend and billionaire Gennady Timchenko — was recently raided by activists and offered as a safe house to Ukrainian refugees.
Both Putin daughters were sanctioned by the Britain and the United States last week.
Peskov called the new measures a “frantic tendency” by Washington to impose sanctions on Moscow. “Russia will definitely react and do as it sees fit,” he added.
Putin is said to have other illegitimate children, all of whom appear to have lived in Western countries. These reports have always been denied by the Kremlin.
Despite his own family’s ties to the West, Putin has recently targeted other Russians with “mansions in Miami or on the Cote d’Azur who can’t do without foie gras, oysters, or gender freedom, as they call it.”
The problem with such people, Putin said on March 16, is that “their minds are over there and not here with our people and with Russia.”
Drew Griffin and Jeffrey Winter contributed to this report.