Ukraine: Kyiv mayor says Putin's claims are 'bull****'
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The war in Ukraine has been raging nearly a month, with direct conflict creeping up on Kyiv, the capital city. Last week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the US Congress via video link, just as the US embassy in Kyiv claimed that Russian forces shot and killed ten people in the city of Chernihiv. Those people, the tweet said, were standing in line for bread.
As Russia struggles to achieve a victory in Ukraine — many experts suggest President Vladimir Putin expected to take the country within days — attention has turned to the country’s leader’s history and state of mind.
Many have claimed that he has retreated into the comfort of isolationism because of the coronavirus pandemic, which has affected his mental processes — but expert psychological profiler Aubrey Immelman told Express.co.uk that what we see today is characteristic of Putin’s personality.
Others have turned to the archives to find information about Putin’s private life in a bid to assess the events that have led up to the invasion.
Putin has been famously tight-lipped about his and his family’s life, with little information readily available.
But, in a 2014 investigation for Newsweek, Owen Matthews, Spectator magazine’s Russia correspondent, delved into the secret history of Putin’s family, charting how he had sealed the lid on any information about his relatives escaping the Kremlin.
The operation to bolster Putin’s privacy began in 2000 after he was appointed acting president following the departure of the ailing Boris Yeltsin.
But, of course, some intimate details had emerged prior to this appointment.
We know Putin married his ex-wife, air stewardess Lyudmila, in 1983, and that they had two daughters together: Katerina Tikhonova, known as Katya, and Maria Vorontsova, known as Masha.
Mr Matthew wrote of the years following Putin’s appointment: “The girls’ lives have been enveloped in secrecy — broken very occasionally by unsubstantiated rumours.”
Sporadic reports about the girls have broken through to the mainstream press over the years, like in 2002, when they were reported to be holidaying in Sardinia with Berlusconi’s daughter Barbara.
And later, in 2010, a South Korean paper reported that Katya was about to marry the son of a Korean admiral who had been posted to Moscow.
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That same year, Masha’s reported boyfriend, Jorrit Faassen, an executive of Russia’s state-owned gas company Gazprom and Stroytransgaz, a pipeline manufacturer, hit the headlines when it was reported he had been assaulted by the bodyguards of a banker, Matvei Urin, in a road rage incident in central Moscow.
Urin’s business was subsequently dismantled and he was jailed for fraud.
Masha and Faassen left Russia soon after for a quiet life in Voorschoten, Netherlands, a suburb of The Hague.
But, as Masha and Katya have largely remained under the radar, Mr Matthews wrote: “The disappearing Putin daughters speak volumes about the kind of country Russia has become under his rule.
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“Putin has never stood for a competitive election, so he has never had to parade his family before the media like Western politicians.
“And since there’s no political opposition, there is no one to call him out on the hypocrisy of championing family values while keeping his family deep in the shadows.”
Despite this, the daughters did give rare interviews early on, which were later included in a collection titled, ‘First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin’.
Here, a 14-year-old Katerina complains about being taken out of school because of her father becoming acting president.
She also notes a shift in their personal lives, their movements now shadowed by security guards.
Katerina said: “We have guards when we go to the movies.
“There’s a guy who sits there watching the movie, but I think he’s guarding us at the same time.
“Usually, we don’t even notice the bodyguards.
“Even when we go somewhere with our friends, they stay nearby, but they try not to get in the way.
“We’ve called them over to drink coffee with us a thousand times, but they don’t want to.”
The teen confessed to “flipping out” when she found out about Putin’s new role, at first believing it to be a joke.
And Lyudmila admitted that she “cried for a whole day” when learning about the appointment, because, she said: “I realised that our private life was over.”
Meanwhile, in his address to the US Congress, President Zelensky called on US President Joe Biden to be “the leader of peace”.
In an emotional plea, he said: “Peace in your country no longer depends only on you and your people.
“It depends on those next to you, on those who are strong.”
“Strong doesn’t mean big. Strong is brave and ready to fight for the life of his citizens and citizens of the world.”
He added that his people are “fighting for the values of Europe and the world” as well as their own.
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