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The US on Wednesday put sanctions on Putin’s daughters, barring them from the US financial system.
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The Wall Street Journal said the EU may also sanction Katerina Tikhonovna and Maria Vorontsova.
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Putin rarely speaks of his two daughters, and it is not publicly known how many children he has.
The US government sanctioned two of President Vladimir Putin’s daughters on Wednesday, adding to measures meant to punish Putin personally for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The White House announced the measures on Wednesday, saying that it would bar Putin’s “adult children” from the US financial system, along with other relatives of senior Russian officials.
The White House did not name the children, but a Kremlin spokesperson confirmed that those affected were Katerina Tikhonovna, an accomplished gymnast, and Maria Vorontsova, a medical researcher.
Both are children of Putin by his former wife, Ludmila Putina. He rarely speaks about them in public.
A White House press release said, of all those sanctioned: “These individuals have enriched themselves at the expense of the Russian people. Some of them are responsible for providing the support necessary to underpin Putin’s war on Ukraine.”
“This action cuts them off from the US financial system and freezes any assets they hold in the United States.”
The Wall Street Journal reported on Tuesday that the sanctions were likely to come, along with measures from the EU and other major economies.
It was not immediately clear after the US announcement whether other countries’ sanctions specifically targeted Putin’s daughters.
An EU spokesperson told Insider that member states are “currently discussing the proposals for further sanctions, including new listings of individuals and entities,” but could not comment on who would be targeted by them.
Putin himself was sanctioned by the US soon after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, breaking a norm against personal sanctions on heads of state.
Few of the reported details of the lives of Putin’s children are formally confirmed. In 2015, Putin’s spokesperson Dmitry Peskov denied rumors that Putin had a further child with Alina Kabayeva, his reported mistress, Forbes Russia reported.
It is unclear whether Tikhonovna and Voronstova have holdings outside of Russia. Tikhonova married billionaire Kirill Shamalov, the son of a close friend of the president, in a union that would have valued the couple at around $2 billion, Reuters reported in 2015. They split in 2018, Bloomberg reported.
Their holdings included a $3.7 million seafront apartment in Biarritz, France, per Reuters. After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, activists broke into the villa — registered in Shamalov’s name — and said they intended to host Ukrainian refugees there.
Vorontsova is a co-owner of Russian private healthcare investment company called Nomenko, Time reported. She left her home in the Netherlands in 2014 after the downing of Malaysia Airlines’ flight MH17, which killed several Dutch residents and is long suspected to be the work of the Kremlin.
An investigation by Russian outlet The New Times in 2016 said that Vorontsova lived a”luxury” existence of foreign travel and yacht trips.
Read the original article on Business Insider
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism