Kremlin-connected children grew up in the very countries whose societies their parents claim to reject

Their parents own prime real estate on the most exclusive avenues of Europe’s capitals. Their social media profiles are filled with designer dresses and red-carpet events. One young woman posted photos of her 22nd birthday, poolside at the Adriatic Sea villa of one of Putin’s oligarchs.Meet the kids of the Kremlin. While their parents publicly rail against the West, their kids grow up in the very countries whose societies they claim to reject.”It is obviously extreme hypocrisy,” said Daniel Treisman, a professor specializing in Russian politics at the University of California, Los Angeles. “They may not even see a contradiction,” Treisman said. “They believe that there’s this competition between the US and Russia, but why should that affect their daughter’s educational plans? Or where they have their chateaus?” Putin himself blasted Russians who may “mentally” align with the West in a speech last month, accusing them of thinking they are part of a “higher race” and working with the “collective West” toward one goal: “the destruction of Russia.” “The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a gnat that accidentally flew into their mouths,” Putin said.Putin himself is no exception to the hypocrisy of tough anti-Western rhetoric in the face of family members, or those close to him, taking advantage of what the West has to offer.One of his purported partners, who allegedly bore him a daughter, became the owner of a $4.1 million apartment in Monaco just weeks after the child was born, according an investigation by Russian independent media outlet Proekt, based on the so-called Pandora Papers.His eldest daughter, Maria, reportedly married a Dutch businessman; the couple is said to have lived in a $3.3 million apartment in the Netherlands. An eight-bedroom villa in Biarritz, France, linked to his younger daughter, Katerina — the multimillion-dollar mansion was bought by her former husband, Kirill Shamalov, from Putin’s longtime friend and billionaire Gennady Timchenko — was recently raided by activists and offered as a safe house to Ukrainian refugees.

Both Putin’s daughters were sanctioned by the United Kingdom and the United States last week. Peskov called the new measures a “frantic tendency” by Washington to impose sanctions on Moscow. “Russia will respond without fail and will do so as it sees fit,” he added. Putin is rumored to have more children out of wedlock, all of who appear to have lived in Western countries. These reports have always been denied by the Kremlin. Despite his own family members’ connections to the West, Putin recently took aim at other Russians with “villas in Miami or the French Riviera, who cannot make do without foie gras, oysters or gender freedom as they call it.”The problem with such people, Putin said on March 16, is that they are “over there in their minds and not here with our people and with Russia.”Drew Griffin and Jeffrey Winter contributed to this report.