Where They Are And What They Do

For her part as Putin’s reported current partner, former rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabaeva, a formidable Russian media and sports magnate in her own right, was on March 7, in the war’s first week, reported by the (London) Times and its sister publication, the New York Post, to be ensconced in a Swiss villa with a variously reported number of children. Presumably among them were reported to be: the child she gave birth to in Switzerland, in Lugano in 2015, and the somewhat younger two boys with whom she has been previously photographed, all rumored to have been fathered by Putin. The Post writer has it that there was a set of twins born in Lugano, but that is not what the Swiss say, who put that count at one.

Put it this way: Vladimir Putin can have either three or four children with Ms. Kabaeva, such has been his success at keeping that private. No matter the number, it’s certainly logical and belongs to the Putin playbook for Ms. Kabaeva to reduce her visibility as the war rages.

If she were currently in Switzerland — a big “if” — it would have been logical for her to buttress that invisibility by dispatching herself and her brood there, were it not for another ballooning effect of the war, namely, the raging political and public debate in all Western countries at any and all Russian presence, economic or otherwise. On March 20 the Swiss authorities announced that Ms. Kabaeva was not, as they could determine, in the country.

That did not mean that she was not in the country on March 7. At any rate, Kabaeva’s occasional presence in the famously neutral Alpine country has been the object of considerable scrutiny and debate since Putin brought war to the Ukraine on February 28, and going forward, Ms. Kabaeva will be confronting more of that, should she decide on respite there. There have been no reports that Ms. Kabaeva has returned to Russia. As with much on and around her, the screen is successfully blanked.

When we last checked in on Elizaveta Vladimirovna Krivonogikh — aka “Luiza Reznovo,” approximate age 19, aka the reported out-of-wedlock daughter of Vladimir Putin and Svetlana Krivonogikh, the former cleaning-service lady and current St. Petersburg business magnate, ski resort part-owner and minor Rossiya Bank shareholder — Elizaveta was demonstrating surprising steel for such a young lady, standing firm against the scores of trolls on her approximately 84,000-strong Instagram account. To boot, early last year, the young fashion maven and sometime student was actually following the rock-hard, currently-jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny online, which surprised even the team of Russian journalists, Проект (translation: “Project”), who had initially discovered young Elizaveta during their their reporting in 2020 and 2021, as they researched her mother Svetlana’s connection to Putin and her subsequent, mysteriously-swift graduation from cleaning lady to business figure in St. Petersburg.

The Russian president has not yet publicly acknowledged Elizaveta as kin, much less as one of his children, nor has she acknowledged him as her father. Nor should we expect them to. In the now-seemingly-halcyon months before her alleged father’s invasion of the Ukraine, Elizaveta publicly admitted that she looks a bit like him. Adding fuel to the filial connection is her steadfastly traditional Russian patronymic, “Vladimirovna,” the formal feminization of the name Vladimir. The young lady was not contesting the claims one way or another. She was simply leading her life.

Elizaveta’s much-ballyhooed social account cleaved resolutely to the latter-day Barbie-doll form for a late-teens St. Pete girl with too much easy money — the odd buying spree to London and/or Paris with momma, pouty over the shoulder shots, lots of flashy Italian and French designer kit, heels and whatnot, tossed around on the wanna-be/influencer track. One minor detail was amusingly patriotic: On the right rear pocket of one set of jeans was embroidered the Russian double-headed eagle, a century-old tsarist logo of which Putin himself is especially fond. Put in American terms, in political daughter-land, all the flash and sass was very much not Malia Obama, nor even Tiffany Trump.

Nor did her trifling Instagram thrashings seem something that Elizaveta’s alleged father might have liked. He clearly prefers to erect a sort-of black box carefully walling off any family detail, retired-KGB style, and his one oft-quoted statement on the subject does, in retrospect, broadcast an ominous chill. He said: “I have a private life in which I do not permit interference. It must be respected. I have always reacted negatively to those who with their snotty noses and erotic fantasies prowl into others’ lives.”

The fate of Elizaveta’s Instagram account is instructive. Whether on advice, orders, and/or on her own — which is to say, in reaction to the enormous spike in trolling and general excoriation that the account had drawn since the middle of last year, when her “Luiza Reznovo” cover was blown — Elizaveta stopped posting to the account last October, but she did leave it up. It was most likely a coincidence, but a remarkable one: Without implying knowledge aforethought to anyone but her alleged father, who would, then, have been in the planning stages, Elizaveta’s Instagram posts stopped exactly as the buildup for the invasion of Ukraine got seriously under way.

Along with many of her generation across Russia, Elizaveta will now be scrambling for a different social media outlet on which to feature her new luxury purchases, but Elizaveta and her mother have already put in an appearance in a weightier venue than Instagram. In his probing February 2021 documentary, Putin’s leading political opponent and personal bête noir Alexei Navalny himself prominently featured Elizaveta and her socially- and financially-agile mother Svetlana, as well as Putin’s reported current partner Alina Kabaeva, in a section of his probing 2021 documentary on Putin’s private life. The film, entitled Putin’s Palace: The Story of The World’s Biggest Bribe, maps the Russian president’s ever-so-delicate construction of the web of support — and its impact has only deepened over time.

As Elizaveta’s supposed father’s war kicked off with brio on February 23rd, she kept the Instagram account up. It endured exactly one week of the war, and now seems finally to have succumbed to reality. Fitting as it was that the reported daughter of a well-trained last-generation KGB officer of the old school was forced by her alleged father’s extreme current public notoriety to use a code name on Instagram, “Luiza Reznovo” is no more. But Elizaveta Krivonogikh is certainly doing well in St. Pete.