The White House’s April 6 announcement of sanctions against two notable Russian professionals, Katerina Tikhonova (nee Putina) and Maria Vorontsova Faassen (nee Putina), doesn’t come as an enormous surprise, rather, the question is why it has taken so long. As the two known, officially acknowledged daughters of Russia’s apparent strongman-for-life, Vladimir Putin, Ms. Tikhonova, a much-decorated Moscow State University academic, and Ms. Faasen, a pediatric endocrinologist married to Dutch businessman Jorrit Faassen, are understood to be very comfortably situated in their lives.
Through her first marriage to Kirill Shamalov, son of Rossiya Bank co-owner Nikolai, Katerina Tikhonova is estimated to share in a fortune estimated a some $2 billion. Not unexpectedly, and in keeping with what we know of the remaining and staunchly loyal upper echelon in the financial and political circles with which Ms. Tikhonova’s father has surrounded himself, the younger Mr. Shamalov experienced a meteoric rise before and during his marriage to Ms. Tikhonova and became, at the ripe age of 20, Gazprom’s lead foreign-business legal beagle. Ms. Tikhonova and Mr. Shamalov were married in 2013 in a lush, albeit typically hush-hush, weekend at the spanking-new Igora ski resort, the resort especially favored by the Russian president and the one at which the formidable St. Petersburg businesswoman Svetlana Krivonogikh had, before her sudden rise to good fortune, been employed as a cleaning lady.
Unlike their rumored and unacknowledged half-sister, Elizaveta (Luiza) Krivonogikh, Maria Tikhonova and Katerina Faassen have attempted to fly under the radar, surfacing only briefly here and there. In 2014, the year after her marriage, Ms. Tikhonova competed in a rock-n-roll dance/gymnastic competition in Switzerland, in which she and her partner placed well, and it was the photographs resulting from that successful competition that were then compared with Moscow State University photographs (where she worked), leading, in turn, to her identification as Putin’s daughter. Putin spoke of his two daughters just once, briefly, at a 2015 press conference — at a presumably planted softball question — to say that they were in Russia, still studying and beginning their careers, which did not include business and politics. He also said that he was proud of them.
Calculated another way, Ms. Tikhonova and her sister had a good twenty-odd year run incognito, meaning, to the outside world. Inside Russia, it’s safe to assume, her heritage was extremely carefully not-expressly-acknowledged, but very, very, very well-known. Ms. Tikhonova, who holds a masters in physics, is the head of a very well-funded AI laboratory at Moscow State.
It’s an understatement to say that, now, their very well-padded lives under but not quite off the public radar seems thoroughly finished for both daughters. Apparently divorced from Ms. Tikhonova a scant few years later, Putin’s former son-in-law Mr. Shamalov reportedly still owns a prime 19th-century villa in Biarritz, on France’s storied Cote Basque, which house was broken into in mid-March by French activist Pierre Haffner in protest of the war. Haffner posted a video on Youtube, stating that "This house was bought with money stolen by Putin, by his mafia, from the Russian people and the peoples oppressed by Putin's Russia." A subtitle on the video stated that the house was now “open” for refugees from the Russian president’s war.
According to reports, Ms. Tikhonova’s mother and Putin’s first wife, Lyudmila Skrebnova, and her new husband, have a villa in the nearby small town of Angelet. No word yet on whether the freshly announced White House sanctions, or extant French sanctions, will be affecting either of those properties.
Similarly, Dr. Katerina Faassen and her husband Jorrit have not escaped the early phase of Dr. Faasen’s father’s war untouched. In 2014, after pro-Russian forces apparently mistakenly downed MH017 over Ukraine, she lived in Amsterdam, where Dutch protesters called for her expulsion from the country. More recently, some Amsterdam protesters have put up a sign on land owned by the Faassens asking in most polite, yet satiric, tones that, since Dr. Faassen’s father was infamously difficult to reach, perhaps she could intercede with him to get him to stop the war.
As likely as it is that the message reached Dr. Faassen, it’s unlikely that she’s acted on it. But the larger point is, as the White House sanctions descend, their father has put Dr. Faasen and her sister on the map now.
