Vladimir Putin’s lover, Alina Kabaeva, was secretly paid by a military unit linked to the dictator when she was only 17 years old, according to new revelations.
She was already a star rhythmic gymnast and had won her first gold medal two years earlier at the time. But this link to Putin – revealed by We Can Explain independent media – was around eight years before her hidden relationship with the dictator, now 72, was first publicly aired by a Russian newspaper, which was rapidly shut down.
It was also four years before Kabaeva won her Olympic Gold at the 2004 Games. The 41-year-old gymnast, who is believed to share two young sons with Putin, is now one of Russia’s wealthiest women, with a hidden property empire worth at least £81.85 million, although even today Putin does not acknowledge his relationship with the glamorous woman who shares his multiple palaces, according to the report.
The significance of the payment from military unit Number 16660 located in Ramenskoye near Moscow is “intriguing” but unexplained. The unit is part of the Federal Protective Service [FSO] and is directly controlled by the Russian president.
The payments were made in 2000–2001, Putin’s first full year as president, and were highlighted by the media outlet from Kabaeva’s official confidential pension records. The military unit was “based on a government communications battalion,” according to We Can Explain, which added: “While the amounts Kabaeva earned were modest, the fact that she was associated with the FSO at just 17 years old is intriguing.”
Kabaeva worked there for seven months and five days, according to the pension records – yet Sobedednik news outlet said servicemen working there at the time had never seen her. “No, 100 per cent [she was not there],” said one officer. The unit refused to answer questions on the payments Kabaeva received.
The mystery payments – totalling £420 – were made to Kabaeva while Putin was married to Lyudmila, then Russia’s first lady from who he is now divorced from, and two years before the birth of secret love child Elizaveta Krivonogikh, now 21 – aka Luiza Rozova – to his then mistress Svetlana Krivonogikh, 49. The investigation unearthed footage of Kabaeva at a nightclub event in Moscow in 2003, when she was 20.
She was asked: “Do you have someone special in your life?” Kabaeva replied: “Well, I can’t say he’s my beloved.” She was asked: “So, you’re single?” She replied: “Well, not exactly single. Of course, there’s someone who loves me very much.” She did not name Putin, and has not done so since.
We Can Explain said that there were rumours of an earlier Kabaeva romance with singer Murat Nasyrov, who later died mysteriously in a fall from a fifth floor Moscow window, triggering claims he had been murdered. Footage filmed in 2003, when she was 20, showed the pair dancing as he sang the song Alina, with the line: “Don’t cry, my Alina.”
The publication said it could find “no evidence of either the relationship between Kabaeva and Nasyrov or his alleged murder,” yet there was clear evidence of a long-standing relationship with Putin, though when it began remains uncertain. At the time of his death in 2007, Nasyrov, 37, was seen as being under the influence of drugs.
The following year, aged 21, she posed for a Russian Maxim shoot, naked except for strategically placed fur. “I didn’t ask Alina to pose completely nude. Maxim magazine only allows a certain level of nudity,” said photographer Mikhail Korolov, who described her as “full of sex”.
When in 2008 a report surfaced in the Moscow Korrespondent newspaper that Putin would wed Kabaeva, the Kremlin ruler exploded. “In what you said [about the Kabaeva story], there is not one word of truth. I have always reacted negatively to those who with their snotty noses and erotic fantasies prowl into others’ lives,” he said.
He told the media: “There are limits and I have a private life in which I do not permit interference. It must be respected.” Editor Grigory Nekhoroshev always stood by the story even when owner Alexander Lebedev closed his newspaper.
Nekhoroshev told We Can Explain that Putin’s comment was aimed at him: he had a runny nose when he was interrogated by Russian agents over the report. We Can Explain outlines how Kabaeva and her family have become wealthy from her relationship to Putin from which she is believed to have sons Ivan, nine, and Vladimir junior, five.
She was a pro-Putin MP before nominally heading a Kremlin-friendly media group where her last known salary was around £8million a year. “Taxpayer money funds the lavish lifestyle of his secret family,” said the report. “A home for Kabaeva was built on state property [and] her real estate is gifted by Putin’s friends who profit from government contracts.
“She is paid by companies engaged in propaganda and deceit. It’s no secret that Alina Kabaeva is one of the wealthiest women in Russia. However, her wealth and assets are carefully concealed.
“Her penthouses and mansions are registered under various proxies and offshore entities. Despite essentially serving as a First Lady, Kabaeva does not disclose her income. Yet even from official records, she is listed as owning several apartments in Moscow and St Petersburg, as well as two mansions.”
She also has billions of roubles worth of property in Sochi, where she runs an elite gymnastic academy. In November, she was seen in a £2,960 Dior dress, despite sanctions against her due to her relationship to Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. In an earlier interview in 2008, Kabaeva, then 24, and who perhaps had expected Putin, at the time 55, to publicly acknowledge her, said she had met her “ideal man” and confessed: “Sometimes I am so happy I am scared to be that happy.” She replied that her mystery lover was “a very good man, a great man.”
