logo
'Putin's secret ten-year-old son, he shares with gymnast lover', is seen following in his mother's footsteps on stage.

'Putin's secret ten-year-old son, he shares with gymnast lover', is seen following in his mother's footsteps on stage.

Daily Mail​15-07-2025
New pictures and videos have appeared of the boy who, it has been claimed, is Vladimir Putin 's secret son.
The boy, now ten, called Ivan, is said to have been born to the Russian dictator's hidden partner, Alina Kabaeva, 42, an Olympic gold medal-winning rhythmic gymnast.
Fresh images in a public gymnastics performance were highlighted by anti-Kremlin Telegram channel VChK-OGPU, which in April published the first photos of a child they called 'the loneliest boy in Russia '.
Hidden from the public, Ivan is seen to be a member of a gymnastics team and is shown with his alleged mother in open-source pictures dating to 2023. There are also more recent images.
'Ivan is in a team of boy-gymnasts with a separate number within a group performance, and the cameraman's attention is focused on his team,' wrote the caption in the channel.
'He took part in a large [performance] called 'Lezginka' at a festival organised by his mother.'
Footage shows him performing as part of the team at the ALINA 2023 event, and at one point, he is seen blowing a kiss on stage.
Alina - a highly decorated rhythmic gymnast - runs an elite academy in Sochi, Russia's main Black Sea resort, and is behind training sessions in Valdai, north of Moscow.
Putin has sprawling palaces in both locations.
The caption accompanying the pictures added: 'From the numerous photos….of the sports team for which Ivan competes, you can see that one of its members is not an ordinary boy.'
'During performances, training, and other events that take place indoors, there are eight people in the team.
'Alina Kabaeva is often present in the photo of the eight, she is behind one of the boys.
'However, when the team flies, stays in regular hotels, goes to have fun at the zoo, the beach, a water park, or just fool around, the number of its members is reduced to seven people.
'The disappearing boy is Ivan Putin. And Alina Kabaeva, when the seven are photographed, is also missing.'
The channel said the boy does not appear to have been in 'mass events' since 2023, although he still features in his team's images.
Swiss-born Ivan is said to have a younger brother, Vladimir junior, now five, whose pictures have not been publicised.
When the channel first showed the pictures of Putin's alleged son, it added: 'He hardly communicates with other children, spending all his time with guards, governesses, [and] teachers.'
With the latest round of pictures, the channel wrote: 'For some reason, Ivan has a very sad face in almost all the photos.'
He resembles Putin in his Soviet childhood.
The boy appears to be accomplished as a young gymnast. There were contestants from China, Cuba, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Belarus in the same festival as him.
A message posted by his club said their gymnasts showed an 'excellent level of training and the ability to work in a team! Hours of training and rehearsals were not in vain! We are proud!!'.
Pictures appear to show the boy at a training session in June 2025 in Valdai, where Putin has his favourite northern palace.
The Russian leader has never confirmed the young family he is said to have with Kabaeva, three decades his junior.
But in an unguarded moment last year, he referred to watching Russian fairy tale films with 'my little ones'.
State propaganda channel RT translated his words as 'my junior family members'.
Putin told a marathon televised question and answer session: 'Our historic fairy tales and epic tales are being revived. I myself sometimes watch these with pleasure with my little ones.'
A flicker of a smile appeared on his face as he mentioned them.
While Putin and the Kremlin have always denied a relationship between him and glamorous Kabaeva, independent Russian journalists have claimed that they have two sons together.
Until now, the children have never been seen and are alleged to live out of sight behind his high-security palace walls.
Putin is also known to have grandchildren from his two eldest daughters - Maria Vorontsova, 40, and Katerina Tikhonova, 38, a scientist, manager and former high-kicking 'rock'n'roll' dancer.
It has been claimed that Putin also has another secret daughter, Ekaterina Krivonogikh, 22 - aka Luiza Rozova.
She is said to have been born to his former mistress, a cleaner turned multimillionaire Svetlana Krivonogikh, 50, who holds shares in a top bank and owns a prominent St Petersburg striptease club.
Luiza is known to have lived in the West - in Paris - during the war in Ukraine.
Putin is highly secretive about his private life. In one interview, the divorced president said: 'I do not permit interference. It must be respected.'
He deplored 'those who with their snotty noses and erotic fantasies prowl into others' lives'.
Kabaeva in 2004 posed almost nude - except for furs - for Maxim magazine in Russia and was described as 'full of sex' by a photographer.
After being temporarily banned in a doping scandal in 2001, she was photographed naked with strategically-placed lilacs as part of a Russian project 'Twelve Months' by Ekaterina Rozhdestvenskaya.
Later, she appeared on a Russian show called One Hundred Questions for Adults when she was questioned about her private life by an audience made up of children.
In one clip, she was asked by a young boy if she had met her 'ideal man', to which she replied, giggling: 'I have.'
She was then asked who the mystery man in her life was, but would only reveal his identity. She said 'he's a very good man, a great man' and added: 'I love him very much.'
Kabaeva said: 'Sometimes you feel so happy that you even feel scared.'
Last year, Dossier Centre, an investigative news outlet, claimed that the longstanding speculation that Kabaeva had two sons with Putin was accurate.
It has been said that the boys have secretly had British and New Zealand citizens as governesses, but now, as a result of Putin's war, the Russian ruler has allegedly recruited South African citizens to teach English to his heirs.
The children are claimed to live under the permanent guard of FSO [Federal Protective Service] officers.
'The brothers have little contact with their peers and see little of their parents, but they appreciate the rare moments they manage to spend with their father,' said Dossier Centre.
Reports claim that they do not attend schools and are taught in Putin's palaces like the royal children of the last Russian tsar.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

School-leavers losing their lives for Russia in Putin's war with Ukraine
School-leavers losing their lives for Russia in Putin's war with Ukraine

BBC News

time2 hours ago

  • BBC News

School-leavers losing their lives for Russia in Putin's war with Ukraine

Vladimir Putin has repeatedly promised that no 18-year-olds called up to serve Russia will be sent to fight in Ukraine, but a BBC Russian investigation has found at least 245 soldiers of that age have been killed there in the past two government rules mean teenagers fresh out of school have been able to bypass military service and go straight into the regular army as contract may make up only a fraction of Russian losses, but cash bonuses and patriotic propaganda have made signing up an attractive Petlinsky enlisted two weeks after his 18th birthday. He was killed in Ukraine just 20 days later: one of hundreds of thousands of soldiers killed in Russia's full-scale war in Ukraine which has also claimed the lives of at least 13,500 Ukrainian civilians since Putin launched the invasion in February 2022. Petlinsky's aunt Ekaterina said he had dreamed of a career in medicine and won a place at a medical college in Chelyabinsk, an industrial regional centre in the Urals."But Sasha had another dream," she told a school memorial event. "When the special military operation began, Sasha was 15. And he dreamed of going to the front."In Ukraine, the call-up age is has managed to avoid a national mobilisation by offering lavish sums to men of fighting age - an especially attractive deal for those in poorer regions with few job men had to have at least three months of conscript service under their belts before signing a restriction was quietly dropped in April 2023, despite protests from some MPs, so now any young man who has reached the age of 18 and finished school can sign up to join the education system has ensured they are ready to enlist. Since the full-scale invasion began, teachers have been required by law to hold classes dedicated to the "special military operation", as the war is officially returning from the front visit schools to talk about their experiences, children are taught how to make camouflage nets and trench candles, and even nursery school pupils are encouraged to send letters and drawings to the the start of the last school year on 1 September 2024, a new subject was brought into the a throwback to the Soviet era, senior students are once again being taught how to use Kalashnikov rifles and hand grenades as part of a course called "The Basics of Safety and Homeland Defence".In many regions, military recruiters now attend careers lessons in schools and technical colleges, telling young people how to sign up as contract soldiers after they Ivanov grew up in a small village in Siberia and dropped out of college where he was learning to be a got into trouble with police, and when he was accused of robbing a small shop in November 2024, he complained to his mother and girlfriend he had been beaten into giving a confession. His friend Mikhail told the BBC that Vitaly had always planned to do his military service when he turned 18. Then, together, they would go and find work building roads in Kazan, ​​a city about 3,700km (2,300 miles) to the he signed a contract to join the army. His family have not ruled out that it was the police who "persuaded" day before he left he called his mother, Anna, to say he was about to leave."I'm off to the North-Eastern Military District," he other words, he was heading for and Alexander reached the frontline at about the same time in last message home on 5 February was to say he was being sent into combat."This was his first and last combat mission," says enlistment office rang her a month later to say he had died on 11 February. As part of BBC Russian's ongoing project using open sources to count Russia's war dead, we have identified and confirmed 245 names of 18-year-old contract soldiers killed in Ukraine between April 2023 - when the rules for joining up were eased - and July were enlisted as contract servicemen and, judging from published obituaries, most joined the armed forces according to our research, since the start of the full-scale invasion at least 2,812 Russian men aged 18-20 years have been killed in BBC's figures are based on open-source information and because not every death is publicly reported, the real losses are bound to be late July the BBC had established the names of 120,343 Russian soldiers killed during the full-scale war. Military experts estimate that makes up 45-65% of the real death toll, which would equate to 185,143 to 267,500 dead. When Alexander Petlinksy turned 18 on 31 January, the first thing he did was to apply to take a year out of college so he could sign a contract with the Defence he had wanted to become a doctor, he also dreamed of going to fight in next month he was already at the front, and on 9 March he died."As a citizen of the Russian Federation, I am proud of my son," his mother, Elena, told the BBC."But as a mother - I can't cope with this loss."She declined to say friend Anastasia says the fact that 18-year-olds are signing contracts to join the army is now a very "painful subject" for her."They're young and naive, and there's so much they don't understand," she says. "They just don't grasp the full responsibility of what they're doing."

Jo Wood on dating after divorce: Just get out there!
Jo Wood on dating after divorce: Just get out there!

Times

time5 hours ago

  • Times

Jo Wood on dating after divorce: Just get out there!

B etrayal by a marital partner can be a truly devastating experience. Jo Wood knows the territory well. The 70-year-old entrepreneur and interior designer was married to the Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood for 24 years until he left her for a 19-year-old Russian cocktail waitress in 2008. He went on to marry the theatre producer Sally Humphreys, 31 years his junior, in 2012. Wood has now written a novel in which she describes a woman navigating the break-up despair in a way I've never read before. Her heroine can't eat or sleep. She won't wash or even get dressed. She hasn't shaved her armpits for six weeks … and 'my bush was out of control', Wood writes. 'Well, that's what it was like for me too,' she says. 'When I was really brokenhearted I totally let myself go. I didn't shave my legs, I didn't shave anything. I was just miserable. My eldest son said to me, 'Mum, get yourself together', and I thought, 'What am I going to do with my life now?'

Trump says he wants to maintain nuclear limits with Russia
Trump says he wants to maintain nuclear limits with Russia

Reuters

time7 hours ago

  • Reuters

Trump says he wants to maintain nuclear limits with Russia

WASHINGTON, July 25 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would like to maintain the limits on U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons deployments set in the 2010 New START agreement, which expires in February. "That's not an agreement you want expiring. We're starting to work on that," Trump told reporters as he exited the White House on a trip to Scotland. It was the first time since taking office that Trump has said he wants to maintain the treaty's limits on strategic nuclear weapons deployments when it expires on February 5. "When you take off nuclear restrictions, that's a big problem," Trump said. The New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or New START, is the last remaining nuclear arms reduction accord between the world's largest nuclear powers. It restricts Russia and the U.S. to deploying no more than 1,550 strategic warheads on 700 intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarines and bombers. Former U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin extended the treaty for five years in 2021 but, as written, the pact cannot be extended further. Trump opposed an extension in his first term, calling instead for a new treaty that included China, which spurned the proposal. Trump has been an advocate for reining in nuclear weapons. He said in February that he would like to have conversations with Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping about limiting their nuclear arsenals. U.S.-Russia relations are at their lowest point in more than 60 years, in part fueled by Putin's threats to use nuclear weapons in his war against Ukraine and his development of exotic new weapons systems. With New START's expiration, the U.S. and Russia could begin deploying more strategic warheads and each could find it harder to gauge the other's intentions, arms control advocates warn.

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store