Where is Maria Vorontsova? Vladimir Putin's 'hidden daughter' is an endocrinologist
Russian President Vladimir Putin has kept much of his life private, including the number of children he has. However, the official number reported stands at two daughters -- Maria Vorontsova and Katerina Tikhonova. Putin has never acknowledged that the women are his daughters, but it is said to be an 'open secret' in Russia that he shares the girls with his ex-wife Lyudmila Ocheretnaya, a former air hostess he was married to for as many as 30 years. Putin is also suspected to have a third daughter, Luiza Rozova, from an alleged extra-marital relationship.
Maria is a Russian pediatric endocrinologist and is reportedly Putin's eldest daughter. Born in Leningrad, Russian SFSR, the 35-year-old attended German school at Dresden, East Germany. Maria attended a German gymnasium in St. Petersburg, where she and her family moved to in the spring of 1991. Fearing for their safety, Putin sent Maria and her sister Katerina away to Germany later during gang wars involving the Tambov Gang.
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In 1995, Maria played the violin for a Russian consulate general of Hamburg. After she moved to Moscow with her family, Maria attended the German School Moscow. She studied biology at Saint Petersburg State University and graduated in medicine from Moscow State University in 2011.
Maria is married to Dutch businessman Jorrit Faassen. The two were living in a penthouse in the Netherlands in 2013, but Dutch residents called for Maria to be expelled from the country in 2014 after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine. She was reported to be living in Moscow with her husband in 2015.
Maria's recent appearance on national television was in 2021 when she gave a 13-minute interview on rare diseases at the high-profile St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Both the sisters appeared on the same show, taking their public presence to a new level and raising hopes that the public may see more of them in the coming years.
At the time of their appearance, analyst Andrei Kolesnikov of the Carnegie Moscow Center had said, "Why bring these purported daughters of Putin to such an event, and what was the point of them speaking publicly? Either they were being used by lobbyists for their own purposes, as one might think especially from the appearance of Katerina Tikhonova, or they just thought it would be interesting to show the external media what Putin's daughters say and think and look like." "Maybe this is just a little drawing back of the curtain without identifying the real functions of the president's daughters. Maybe this is a foretaste of some sort of emergence onto the big stage," Andrei had added.