Putin ‘to seize port in spring’
She’s an Olympic gymnast half his age who’s said to have borne him two children and become Russia’s secret First Lady
AMERICA’S top intelligence official is predicting that Vladimir Putin plans to seize the strategic Ukrainian port of Mariupol in spring.
Such a move by Russian-backed rebels would amount to a huge escalation in the conflict in the east of the country, because it would be a key step in creating a land bridge to annexed Crimea.
James Clapper, US director of National Intelligence, said: ‘[Putin] wants a whole entity composed of the two oblasts [regions] in eastern Ukraine which would include a land bridge to Crimea and perhaps a port, in specifically Mariupol.’
China yesterday voiced its support for Russia, with prominent diplomat Qu Xing calling on the West to ‘abandon its zerosum mentality’.
The Chinese ambassador to Belgium said the West should take ‘the real security concerns of Russia into consideration’.
Ahead of the recent ceasefire, there were already acute fears pro-Moscow rebels were preparing an assault on Mariupol, a Sea of Azov port.
Moscow has struggled to supply Crimea from mainland Russia since annexing the Black Sea peninsula a year ago. For now, land transport depends on ferry services across the Kerch Strait. Seizure of Mariupol would represent a huge defeat for Ukraine and its backers in the West who want to stall Putin’s alleged land grab strategy.
Mr Clapper made clear he favoured supplying arms to Kiev to counter Russian expansionism. He acknowledged that this was his ‘personal view’ and not necessarily the position of US intelligence agencies.
But Lieutenant General Vincent Stewart, the head of US military intelligence, told a Senate hearing that the Russians ‘will up the ante if we do any lethal aid or take any actions to bolster the equation’.
When asked her lover’s name, she just giggled ‘He’s a vampire who sucked all the life out of me’
WheN a fleet of armoured cars pulled up outside a small cafe in the centre of Moscow last December, a crowd of onlookers gathered, waiting for a glimpse of whoever was inside. Who on earth, they wondered, could be important enough to require a phalanx of machinegun-toting uniformed guards, all clad in bulletproof vests, just to buy a late-night cup of coffee at Coffeemania in Kudrinskaya Square?
When the car doors opened, they had their answer. Out stepped a strikingly beautiful young woman whose face was instantly recognisable to those who saw her.
Alina Kabayeva, a former Olympic gold medalwinning rhythmic gymnast, is widely believed to be the lover of Russian President Vladimir Putin and, according to several sources, the mother of at least one of his children.
Although she is rarely seen in public — and never on Putin’s arm — the 31-year-old is seen by many Russians as their country’s undeclared First Lady.
But, like so many things in Putin’s private life, Alina Kabayeva has been kept hidden in the shadows.
Indeed, while the 62-year-old Russian leader continues to rattle his sabre at Nato after annexing parts of Ukraine, on the home front he has silenced stories about his private life, maintaining a carefully choreographed public image as the strongman hero of his country.
Russian journalists claim it is easier to report on matters of national security than the inner workings of Putin’s private life. As we shall see, there are repercussions for those who dare.
Nevertheless, fragments of i nformation continue to seep out.
Last week, for example, a TV documentary which aired i n Germany made a series of eye - catching allegations against the bellicose l eader. According to t he programme, Putin The Man, documents from the archives of Germany’s spy agency BND claim that during the early years of his marriage to his former wife Lyudmila, Putin was a ‘wife-beater and a philanderer’. The information was obtained by a female agent posing as the then Mrs Putin’s interpreter.
The programme also alleged that the Russian leader is terrified of getting old.
‘Putin is afraid of physical decay, he is afraid of ageing,’ biographer Ben Judah told the programme-makers.
In an effort to stay young, Putin — who has in the past been photographed with tigers and polar bears as well as horse riding bare- chested in Siberia — is said to take hot and cold baths followed by gym sessions to hone his athletic figure.
According to one Western intelligence report, cited by the programme from German television company ZDF, he even had a facelift in 2010 to iron out the creases in his forehead and the bags beneath his eyes, in readiness for his return as president in 2012 after a brief stint as prime minister.
his face, rarely expressive at any time, is now a frozen mask of smoothness, prompting further speculation that he has become a fan of Botox, the anti-wrinkle jab.
Keeping up with a lover half his age might, of course, be behind such drastic behaviour, not to mention his sudden divorce from Lyudmila after three decades of marriage and two daughters together.
Their separation was announced at the Kremlin in June 2013, minutes after Putin and his wife had watched a Russian state ballet performance of La esmeralda.
‘A joint decision’ was how Putin described it, blaming his workload and looking tentatively and rather awkwardly at his 55-year- old wife for approval.
Lyudmila Putin nodded in agreement, fixing a smile on her face, adding that the couple ‘ practically never see each other’ and summing up their separation with her own phrase — ‘a civilised divorce’.
But however blasé the Russian leader and his wife tried to be about the end of their union, evidence has gathered t hat beneath t heir seemingly amicable separation is a far more colourful story.
For the past year, speculation has been rife that the couple’s sudden divorce declaration was merely a prelude to some other big revelation yet to come about the President and his relationship with Kabayeva. Yet still this enigmatic woman appears to be living under a veil of secrecy.
Born in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1983, the same year that Putin and former Aeroflot stewardess Lyudmila married, Kabayeva has been the talk of Moscow’s political and journalistic salons for the past seven years for her alleged affair with the president.
Photographs of the glamorous, highly decorated sportswoman and Putin at official functions show the usually stony-faced president gawping at her like a besotted schoolboy.
Kabayeva has also enjoyed a meteoric rise in fortune under the president’s watchful eye. After retiring from gymnastics in 2005, she became an MP in his United Russia Party.
Last September she stood down and — despite her youth and relative lack of experience — was made chairman of a major pro-Kremlin media group.
There have been rumours that Kabayeva has had at least one child with Putin, although she denied being a mother in January 2011 in a cover- story interview with Russian Vogue, claiming that the little boy living with her was her nephew.
Recently there have been more suggestions of Kabayeva’s place in the president’s heart.
At last year’s Winter Olympics in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, she carried the Olympic flame aloft while an approving Putin looked on, even though at the peak of her career she was banned for a drugs transgression.
Several months before that, Russian state television broadcast a flattering documentary to mark t he vivacious Kabayeva’s 30th birthday. While no questioner dared to mention Putin by name, she spoke coquettishly of a man whom ‘I love very much’.
Pressed for his identity, she giggled and twiddled her hair before answering: ‘You’ve managed to ask that question. Well done.’
And in December last year, at around the time Kabayeva was spotted purchasing her late-night coffee under armed guard, Putin tantalisingly revealed in an interview that he was in a relationship in which he ‘loves’ and ‘is loved’.
But still there has been no admission that the object of his affections is Kabayeva.
It was in spring 2008 that a small Russian newspaper, the Moskovsky Korrespondent, published the first story linking the pair, incorrectly suggesting that the politician had already divorced Lyudmila and that his second wedding was imminent.
As a result, the owner of the paper, oligarch Alexander Lebedev, who later bought the London evening Standard and the Independent, was forced to close the title down.
But reports of Putin’s alleged romance continued to emerge. In July 2008 another newspaper claimed that Kabayeva had pulled out of a TV ice show extravaganza ‘ because of her pregnancy’. The report subsequently vanished from internet databases.
Other potential pieces of evidence for her pregnancy are flight records from 2 0 0 9 which s how t hat Kabayeva flew with two of Putin’s most trusted friends from Prague to Sochi. One was Dmitry Gorelov, a former Red Army doctor, who was granted the ti tl e of ‘ honoured healthcare practitioner of t he Russian Federation’ by Putin in a 2000 presidential decree.
Kabayeva gave birth to a son by Putin, named Dmitry, in 2009, according to reports in the New York Post. A daughter is said to have been born in 2012.
Then came the Putins’ divorce announcement — which raised further questions about why, having refused to discuss his private life for so long, the President was suddenly, if briefly, being so open.
Some commentators believe that it was simply becoming too difficult to stop the infidelity rumours affecting his image.
One popular Russian political blogger, Leonid Volkov, believes that Putin wanted to erase the image of an unfaithful husband. ‘I’ve heard many taxi drivers say it many times: “If he’s cheating on his wife, it means he’s deceiving the country”,’ he says.
Others say that it was Mrs Putin who ultimately forced her husband’s hand, remaining at his side only long enough to allow him to win a second term as president without rocking the boat.
According to journalist Kseniya Sobchak, who claims to be a confidante of Mrs Putin, the split was ‘definitely orchestrated’ by Lyudmila. ‘I’m sure that she pushed him and I’m sure she had wanted for a while to end the strange, dubious position they were in.’
Without a doubt, Lyudmila had always been a reluctant First Lady, once revealing in a rare interview that she cried when Putin became
president, saying: ‘My private life had ended with all this.’
In March 1980, when they met in what was then Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), farmer’s daughter Lyudmila Shkrebneva was an air hostess — pretty, slim and blonde — and Vladimir Putin was a KGB operative. Although he told Lyudmila he was, like his father, working for the police, she found out the truth from a friend 18 months later.
What she saw in Putin, a man she has readily admitted is emotionally cold, is sometimes hard to see. When they began dating, he often left her waiting in dingy subway stations, on the brink of tears, for as long as 90 minutes. ‘I would nearly cry out of humiliation,’ she said in a rare interview with the author of the book Vladimir Putin: Road To Power.
‘It wasn’t instantaneous passion or love at first sight,’ she recalled of their three-year courtship. ‘For the first time in my life, I fell in love gradually.’
They married in 1983 in a state ceremony, then a traditional Russian Orthodox ceremony, but life as Mrs Putin proved challenging.
The early years of their marriage were spent in East Germany, where Putin was posted as a KGB agent f rom 1985 to 1990, posing as director of the Soviet- German cultural centre in Dresden.
It seems Putin’s view of a wife’s role was far from enlightened.
Lyudmila told her husband’s biographer that, while seven months pregnant with the couple’s first daughter, she was left to carry heavy shopping up several flights of stairs to their apartment.
While photographs from those years reveal a semblance of normal family life, that was to last only a few years as Putin’s political ambitions took over in the early 1990s. Lyudmila, meanwhile, t hrew herself into raising her daughters and taught German at Leningrad State University.
But while Putin shows no signs of wanting to relinquish a grip on power not seen si nce Soviet times, Lyudmila proved to be a reluctant consort, despite the untold wealth that her husband’s position has brought.
Putin officially earns about £90,000 a year but is said to be one of the richest men in the world, with an oil-backed fortune worth several billion. He enjoys astonishing presidential perks, with access to 20 residences including a lavishly restored Tsarist palace in the Gulf of Finland and a ski lodge in the Caucasus mountains, as well as a fleet of 43 aircraft, 700 cars and four luxury yachts.
Yet Lyudmila once described her husband as an unemotional ‘vampire’ who had ‘sucked all the juices’ out of her.
Of t he couple’s daughters, Masha, 29, and Katya, 28, almost nothing is known. They went to university i n Saint Petersburg under false names.
After the shooting down in July of Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17, widely attributed to Moscowbacked Ukrainian rebels, a Dutch tabloid claimed that Masha was living in the Netherlands with her Dutch partner. Dozens of reporters flocked to the luxury block where she was said to be, to find that she had disappeared (if she was ever there).
Si nce t he Putins’ di v orce, almost nothing has been seen or heard of Lyudmila.
But if the President hoped to end speculation about his private life by announcing his divorce, he must be disappointed that the rumour mill is turning faster than ever.
In Russian media circles there is permanent speculation about when — and if — Putin will introduce Kabayeva to the world as his wife.
For a time it was believed that this would happen at the Winter Olympics l ast year and that Kabayeva, who was wearing a wedding ring, would appear not only as one of Russia’s most famous athletes but as the love of their leader’s life.
But the long-awaited announcement never came.
Instead, Putin’s entourage continue to promote his ‘ monk-like’ image as a bachelor devoted to his country.
‘There is no place for family affairs in his life,’ says his spokesman Dmitry Peskov. ‘It’s only about the duties and responsibility that he has as head of the state.’
Others suspect that, as relations with the West become more strained, Putin does not want his ‘ hard man’ reputation to be softened by talk of love.
Whatever the truth, it seems he will continue to keep a tight lid on affairs of the heart, hiding his emotions behind that ultra-smooth face.