Russian President Vladimir Putin has a secret granddaughter named for a Disney character, an astonishing leak has disclosed.
The child’s existence was revealed when journalists combed through leaked border security logs and found her in a list of departing passenger.
Astonishingly, she shares a first name with a Disney character—and has narrowly avoided sharing a surname with Putin’s most hated enemy.
Elsa Tikhonova was born in December 2017 to the younger of Putin’s two daughters with his ex-wife Lyudmila Putina. She is the daughter of Katerina Tikhonova and her partner, ballet dancer and choreographer Igor Zelensky.
Tikhonova, 40, who is the head of the Innopraktika Foundation, is reportedly a fan of Hollywood, and Russian press reported that she appears to have named her daughter after Frozen’s Princess Elsa, a product of the very West which Putin abhors.
At Tikhonova’s wedding to her first husband, Kirill Shamalov, she performed a song from the animated film Anastasia, a Hollywood take on the Romanov Grand Duchess Anastasia, and the persistent theory that she somehow survived the murder of her father Tsar Nicholas and the rest of his family by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Elsa in Disney's animated movie 'Frozen.'
AlamyAccording to Russian media, Tikhonova and Zelensky began seeing each other in early 2017. She ended her marriage to Shamalov in 2018. However she has not married him, and their daughter is using her mother’s surname, avoiding the bizarre spectacle of Putin’s granddaughter sharing a name with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky.
The revelation is another blow to Putin who was already dealing with the leak of the border documents by his own border police, and by Zelensky’s drone attacks on his domestic military infrastructure, which has rained down destruction on fuel depots, and even on Russia’s equivalent of Amazon, which the country’s military had used to transport weapons components.
Elsa was found by matching lists of passengers leaving the country to known members of Putin’s top-secret family, revealing that Elsa has flown overseas twice in her short life.
In November 2017, she was accompanied by her mother and father to Munich aboard a business jet operated by the German airline Air Hamburg, which is now called VistaJet. Two years later, the girl flew to Croatia on a private Bombardier Global 5000.
Putin,73, has a complicated family tree, thanks to his own divorces, and those of his children.
He has a third daughter with Svetlana Krivonogikh, and two sons with gymnast Alina Kabaeva—Ivan and Vladimir Spiridonov.
He also has a grandson, Roman Faassen, who is the son of eldest daughter Vorontsova, and her first husband, Dutch citizen Jorrit Faassen.
Putin hides his relatives behind fake names to protect their privacy and security. The former KGB intelligence officer has ruled over an increasingly isolated and oppressive Russia since 2000, serving two terms as President, then two as Prime Minister, before returning as President in 2012.
He has stayed in office well past the two-term limit and following a referendum in 2021 signed constitutional amendments that would enable him to continue to hold power until 2036.
His war against Ukraine, launched in early 2022, has dragged on, with Ukraine showing no signs of surrender, and Russian forces failing to deliver on Putin’s promises.
