PARIS — On this day in November 2024, the atmosphere is very calm on the campus of the ICART School of Cultural and Art Management, a stone’s throw from the Champs-Élysées. That is, until a team of Ukrainian journalists from the 1+1 TV channel arrive in the hall, holding a camera and presenting the students with a portrait of a young blonde woman with blue eyes.
Her name was Elizaveta Rudnova, and she was enrolled at the Parisian school. But above all, she’s the hidden daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and therefore the illegitimate half-sister of Katerina and Maria, born in 1985 and 1986.
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No matter how hard the journalists searched, they never found the Russian student. And with good reason — she was enrolled in the Bachelor of Art and Culture program at the EDH group’s private school from 2020, but graduated in June 2024 — five months earlier — and has since disappeared from the radar.
To avoid arousing suspicion, she is said to have used an assumed name. According to the independent Russian investigative media Proekt, her real identity is Elizaveta Vladmirovna Krivonogikh. In Russia, everyone has a first and last name, as well as a patronymic formed from the father’s first name. Here, “Vladmirovna,” in reference to Vladimir. Her surname is the same as her mother’s, Svetlana Krivonogikh.
Yet the program TCH, broadcast on 1+1, Ukraine’s second-largest TV channel, reveals that Elizaveta was circulating in France under the name Elizaveta Olegovna Rudnova, which potentially refers to the businessman and close Putin associate who died in 2015, Oleg Rudnov.
“We were not aware of this double identity. There was never any special security for this student. As far as we were concerned, she was just another Russian student as there might be on campus,” a source close to the case told Le Figaro.
Discreet and reserved
Outside the gates of the ICART school, a student in her final year of a Master’s degree claims to have been in the same class as Elizaveta, without actually having been with her. “She was a reserved, discreet girl. I don’t remember her having any friends in our class,” she confides, wrapped up in her scarf. According to the Parisian, Elizaveta Krivonogikh had no security, no bodyguards and never mentioned a possible family link with the Russian leader. “She was just another student,” she says.
The resemblance between the leader and this young woman is uncanny.
But since the publication of articles in the press, the Russian student’s name has become known to all her former classmates. “One morning, my mother sent me a publication saying that she was Putin’s daughter,” said an astonished third-year student who, like many other students, has never met her. Between internships and exchanges abroad, students from different classes don’t socialize much. Some of them weren’t even aware of the rumor, as the school didn’t react to it.
According to our information, Elizaveta Krivonogikh followed the standard ICART curriculum, the majority of which is taught in French. And according to a school document obtained by the Ukrainian TV program TCH and signed by the campus director of studies, Elizaveta Krivonogikh graduated in four years instead of three, repeating her third year.
Millionaire mother
Rumors about this illegitimate daughter have been circulating since 2020, following the publication of an in-depth investigation into the links between her mother and Vladimir Putin by the renowned investigative media ProektProekt, which has won several awards for its work against corruption and influence peddling in Russia’s upper echelons. The information on the Proekt site was then relayed by the international press, including in France. In 2021, this Russian media outlet was banned by the Kremlin and its journalists put on the list of “foreign agents,” considered to be “under foreign influence.” They now work in exile.
To date, only Proekt and the Ukrainian program TCH — in November 2024 — have been able to provide factual evidence of a possible relationship between Elizaveta Krivonogikh and the Russian president. The Kremlin has never commented on these rumors, as Vladimir Putin refuses to divulge any information about his private life. Other rumors circulate regularly.
Since 2008, the press has suspected the Russian leader of having had a relationship with Russian gymnast Alina Kabaeva, 30 years his junior, with whom he is said to have had two sons. The master of the Kremlin is also occasionally the subject of rumors about a possible illness, such as cancer.
While it is almost impossible to prove that Elizaveta Krivonogikh is Vladimir Putin’s daughter, one thing is certain — the resemblance between the leader and this young woman is uncanny. According to Proekt, she was born in St. Petersburg on March 3, 2003. Her mother, Svetlana Krivonogikh, is said to have met Vladimir Putin in the late 1990s, when he was still married to Lyudmila Chkrebneva (the mother of his two official daughters). Then, suddenly, she became one of Russia’s richest women, after being named a shareholder in Rossiya Bank in 2001, a year after Putin’s presidential election.
She always appears with her face half-hidden, making it impossible to identify her formally.
The independent Russian media also reports that Svetlana Krivonogikh has been spotted several times with the head of state on a plane, as well as with close friends and family in Russia. Although the relationship between the president and Svetlana Krivonogikh was denied by the Kremlin in 2020, rumors have persisted since the Proekt investigation.
Svetlana Krivonogikh subsequently found herself at the head of a substantial real estate portfolio. In autumn 2003, one of her offshore companies purchased a 3.8 million euro apartment in Monaco, a few months after the birth of her daughter. This information was uncovered by the “Pandora Papers” investigation, which revealed in 2021 that thousands of personalities were responsible for large-scale tax fraud and evasion, including Svetlana Krivonogikh.
Proekt, for its part, reports that Putin’s former mistress also acquired apartments in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as well as a yacht and the Igora ski resort in Russia, in the early 2000s, thanks to other offshore companies in her name, or those of people close to the Russian president.
Golden youth
His fortune, estimated at 7.7 billion rubles, or more than 80 million euros, has enabled his daughter Elizaveta to evolve in a privileged and trendy environment between Moscow, St. Petersburg and Paris. And like many young people her age, she likes to share her daily life as a Parisian student on Instagram, where she has several profiles. But again, not under her real name, nor the one she uses with her school friends, but with a third identity: Luiza Rozova.
On one of her Instagram accounts relayed by Russian and Ukrainian media, she always appears with her face half-hidden, making it impossible to identify her formally. She shares her passions of fashion, painting and music in photos. She can be seen at the Louvre, surrounded by Vogue magazines or at the controls of turntables. According to TCH, she hosted a DJ party in Moscow, created her own clothing label “123th Ave” and then organized her own show at St. Petersburg Fashion Week, before moving on to Paris. An attraction to art was confirmed by the Russian version of GQ magazine, which interviewed the student in February 2021.
In the same interview, she confirmed that she was “studying art and culture management,” without specifying the city of her school. In another exchange with SRSLY, a Moscow-based gossip magazine aimed at young Russians, in August 2021, Luiza Rozova also confirmed that she was living in Paris at the time. A city she loves and where she claims to “recharge my batteries,” with her saying, “I’m not ruling out moving elsewhere in the future, but this place is dear to me.” The young woman nonetheless confessed to having made no friends here, and said she had “always had difficult relations” with “young Europeans,” a statement that matches with the portrait painted by her fellow ICART students.
Against the war in Ukraine?
Despite granting these two interviews to the Russian press, Elizaveta Krivonogikh maintains doubts about her relationship with the Kremlin leader. She has never confirmed or denied that she is his daughter. When journalists have tried to get answers from her, she has always remained evasive. “Look, judging by his young photos, yes, I probably look like him. But it turns out there are a lot of people who look like him,” she huffed to GQ.
The year 2022 nevertheless marked a break in her smooth public life. Following the start of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, the 19-year-old influencer received numerous hateful comments and messages asking her, among other things, to take a stand on the conflict. Elizaveta Krivonogikh then disappeared and closed her social networking accounts, according to TCH. But before vanishing from the networks, she published — still on the same Instagram account — two photos with strong political messages, condemning the war in Ukraine. “ I hate pain, I hate suffering, I hate death, I hate war… LET EVERYONE KNOW IT” she wrote, adding that she had “never wanted to become an opinion leader.”
Is she still in Paris? In France? Or had she returned to Russia?
But in the face of this wave of hatred, she explained that she could not “remain silent.” She also responded to internet users’ criticism of her inaction in the face of the situation. “Will a man so mad as to literally declare war on the whole world abandon his decisions because of some parental feeling?” she blurted out, maintaining the vagueness surrounding her links with Putin.
Until then, the young woman had never spoken about politics, and seemed unconcerned. “I live in my artistic world, in my bubble, and I don’t watch television at all. Sometimes I follow the news on Telegram channels, but not much,” she had confided on the Clubhouse social network, relayed by TCH. She prefers to watch “fashion shows,” read Vogue and “discuss the latest gossip and investigations with friends.”
Could she have gone back to her life as an influencer and student, after publishing her last anti-war post on March 12, 2022? Since graduating in June, no one knows where Elizaveta Krivonogikh is. The school has never heard from her again, nor has the Ukrainian or French press. Is she still in Paris? In France? Or had she returned to Russia? The mystery surrounding this young woman continues.
