A palace of 1,200 square meters has been built for Vladimir Putin’s supposed girlfriend Alina Kabajeva (39) on a beautiful island. The president has a residence right nearby. Now this has been declared a “specially protected natural area”.
This means that this part of the beautiful Lake Valdai, not too far from the historic city of Novgorod, will be completely closed to tourists.
It was proekt.media which revealed the construction of the house of Kabajeva and her children. Now there is another Kremlin-independent Russian medium, Medusawhich reports that three days after the disclosure, the area was given a new status as a protected area.
Alina Kabajeva became Olympic champion in rhythmic gymnastics in 2004 and later became a politician in Putin’s United Russia party. She is chairman of Russia’s largest media group. Many wonder how she got there. We’ll come back to that in a bit.
The Kremlin-independent media write that Kabajeva “allegedly” has three children with the president. This has never been confirmed.
However, Proekt.media, which has had a number of important revelations, is clear that a palace has been built for Kabajeva on the island, and that she and Putin will get there with a separate railway line.
According to proekt.media, she owns a total of homes worth around 120 million dollars, or more than 1.2 billion kroner.
Kabaeva’s house on the island is built just a few hundred meters from Putin’s residence. Construction is said to have started in 2020 and was completed two years later. The property also has its own jetty. The house will stand on the plot of land of a rich man with strong ties to Putin, namely Yuri Kovalchuk.
Alina Kabajeva has a total of five employees, two of whom are her cousins, writes proekt.media. Despite the huge house, there will also be a separate building for employees on the property.
VG has previously written about Putin’s own railway line, which will also have stations near the president’s residences in Sochi on the Black Sea and Novo-Ogarjevo outside Moscow.
According to proekt.media, Kabajeva will also have a gigantic penthouse apartment in Sochi, which was the Olympic city in 2014. The apartment is over two floors, has a swimming pool, sauna, solarium, cinema, bar, dance floor and helicopter platform. It will be designed by the office of world-renowned fashion designer Valentin Yudashkin.
With its 2,600 square metres, it will be “Russia’s largest apartment”, according to the independent media, which calls Kabajeva “the secret life partner of President Putin”.
It is also described how Putin’s “secret fund” has financed not only homes for Kabajeva, but also for the president’s ex-wife, his son-in-law and not least: Putin’s own, much-talked-about palace in Gelendzhik, which is also located on the Black Sea.
Kabajeva was exempt from Western sanctions for a long time, but first the UK in May and the EU in June, then the US in August 2022 gradually introduced sanctions against her. At the time, opposition leader Alexei Navalny had long requested such a measure.
Proekt.media claims that she owns more than 20 homes in total. They have pictures and price assessments on all of them – and who disposes of them; sister, mother, grandmother, cousins… Most of them are registered to others, but according to the media are actually owned by her. According to the media, the properties have been paid for by “Putin’s vassals” and friends – people who have made a fortune during Putin’s more than 20 years as Russia’s strongman.
It is also claimed that Kabajeva earns NOK 110 million in her job as chairman of the media company, which is owned by Putin’s good friend Yuri Kovalchuk. She is also allowed to use the private planes of another Putin friend and multibillionaire, Gennady Timchenko, according to proekt.media.
PS: Mediet Proekt is also known by the name Agentstvo and was founded in 2018. They focus on investigative journalism. The founder Roman Badanin has worked for a number of different Russian media and is educated at Stanford University in California.
