Russian President Vladimir Putin and his purported partner, Alina Kabayeva, have hired at least 20 foreign governesses, tutors, and other caregivers to help raise the two boys widely believed to be their sons — most of them from Western countries, including several citizens of NATO states deeply at odds with Moscow over its war on Ukraine.
The family has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to retain helpers to look after the children and teach them English and German, according to a trove of documents and correspondence examined by Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit.
The collection covers the period from 2017 to early 2026 and includes a wide range of materials related to the search, hiring, and work of the caregivers, such as contracts, e-mails, photographs, and reports filed by the foreigners about their daily activities with the children.
It provides a detailed window on one aspect of the highly secretive purported family life of Putin and Kabayeva, the 2004 Olympic rhythmic gymnastics gold medalist who is widely reported to be his longtime partner and the mother of Ivan, born in 2015, and Vladimir, born in 2019.
Putin, 73, has two adult daughters with his ex-wife Lyudmila, from whom he was divorced in 2014. Neither he nor Kabayeva, 43, have confirmed that they are a couple or that they have children together, and the Kremlin works hard to keep Putin’s private life under wraps.
Putin has cast Russia’s war against Ukraine, now in its fifth year since the full-scale invasion he launched in 2022, as part of a civilizational struggle and a defense against what he asserts are efforts by NATO and what he calls the “collective West” to weaken or destroy Russia and impose their will on the world.
In power as president or prime minister since 1999, Putin has regularly railed against the Washington, the West, and NATO. In recent years, Russian state propaganda has demonized Britain and the European Union, in particular, and high officials including Putin have spoken derisively of what they call “Anglo-Saxons.”
Shortly after the start of the invasion, Putin lashed out at members of the Russian elite he said are “mentally located” in the West, warning that Russia’s opponents would use them to “inflict maximum damage on our people” and then cast them aside.
Teaching Boys To Be ‘Educated Europeans’
Nonetheless, one of the tasks assigned to the foreigners employed to help raise the boys is to bring their English and German skills to the level of “educated Europeans” through immersion in the language, according to materials reviewed by Systema.
The largest number of employees have been from Germany, followed by South Africa, and others have come from countries such as Britain, New Zealand, Austria, Ireland, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
Germany and Britain are NATO members and among the strongest supporters of Ukraine in its defense against the Russian invasion. Like Germany, Austria and Ireland are EU members. South Africa is a member of the BRICS group along with Russia, China, Iran, and six other countries.
Systema found only one reference to a Russian hire, a woman engaged to teach Ivan music and familiarize him with composers such as Sergei Prokofiev and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Along with the focus on Western languages, however, have come formal efforts to ensure that the boys do not learn about matters related to sex, gender, or the LGBT community – issues that Putin, who has mocked what he called “gender freedoms” and signed legislation sharply curtailing gay rights, has frequently associated with Europe and the West in public comments.
The contracts seen by Systema prohibit the caregivers from “imposing their religious, political, or ideological views” on their charges, bar them from discussing sexual matters without prior approval, and specify: “Do not touch on themes linked to LGBT under any circumstances.”
Restrictions have also been placed on the freedom of movement of the foreigners, according to the materials, which suggest that they have spent most of their time working at a secluded presidential residence about halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg known as Valdai, where Putin has spent a lot of time over the years.
There is also evidence of time spent in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi, site of another elaborate residence used by Putin, Bocharov Ruchei. But, in an investigation published in 2025, Systema found that Putin had used that residence rarely since the previous year, with Ukrainian drone attacks inside Russia becoming more frequent.
RFE/RL’s Russian Service reported in April that 27 air-defense installations have been set up in the area around the Valdai compound, many of them Pantsir-S1 missile systems.
Correspondence from 2022 shows that an English tutor, a 58-year-old raised in Canada and holding Irish and British passports, was told that she could not go into town to shop or “visit various public places” in her free time. “Prepare a list of [items] you need and we can buy them and give them to you after treating them with safety agents,” she was told.
The hires have been subjected to thorough and frequent medical exams, and evidence of occasional quarantine appears in work schedules in 2018, before the COVID pandemic hit.
Among other restrictions, they have been barred from speaking to outsiders about their work or posting information on social media, the documents show. They also show that the tutors, governesses, and other helpers have been required to submit detailed daily reports about their work with the boys.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabayeva at a meeting with the Russian Olympic team in the Kremlin, November 2004
Neither Putin nor Kabayeva is named in the contracts or other documents. But there is ample evidence that they are “the family,” “the parents,” and “the employers” referred to repeatedly in the materials, including references by name to the elder boy, Ivan, and to “the little one,” with ages corresponding to those of the two purported brothers.
Exhaustive Steps
Systema also took exhaustive steps to corroborate the evidence in the files, including sifting through photographs, social media posts, flight records, and other publicly available information pertaining both to the foreigners and the people close to Putin and Kabayeva involved in their hiring.
The Berlin-based Data and Research Center (DARC), an independent expert group that supports investigations, said that time stamps and other aspects of the documents provided to Systema bore no signs of falsification or other suspicious details, but that it would be difficult to speak of their authenticity with absolute certainly.
The family began looking abroad for helpers in 2017, the year Ivan turned two, and by 2018, his schedule included English, German, and music. A foreign woman was hired to teach the toddler English and also care for him as a nanny, the documents show.
RFE/RL knows the names of hires from passport copies and other documents and correspondence, but is not revealing their identity in order to protect their privacy.
As a rule, there have been four to six foreign caregivers working for the family at any given time, with some fulfilling different roles — such as teaching English and German – and some replacing each other in shifts.
The correspondence seen by Systema reveals some banal matters in detail, such as a dispute with one governess over whether she had cleaned Ivan adequately after he went to the bathroom at one point in November 2018.
Amid the public antipathy toward the West on the part of the Russian authorities, who discourage adhering to Western traditions, a report from an English tutor that was seen by Systema suggests Ivan created a greeting card for his “mummy and daddy” on Western Christmas in December 2018 that featured Santa Claus. Russian Orthodox Christmas falls in January and its symbol is Ded Moroz, or Grandfather Frost.
The foreign workers’ pay appears to have varied widely and increased over time, with one caregiver paid 1,400 euros ($1,630) a month in 2019 to salaries that in some cases reached 7,000 euros ($8,140) — more than six times the average monthly wage in Russia in 2025.
‘Absolute Discretion, Loyalty, Silence, And Obedience’
Contracts indicate that each caregiver is provided with a room in an apartment or in a hotel suite, with the stipulation that they may have to share the space with another person but will be guaranteed their own room and bathroom with shower.
The files indicate that some hires have been dismissed before their contract expired, some others quit of their own accord, and several prospective caregivers have traveled to Moscow or St. Petersburg, gone through interviews and examinations, and been sent back home.
A 34-year-old Austrian woman who had prepared avidly for the job of taking care of a 4-year-old and immersing him in the German language was disillusioned, after arriving in July 2019 and first staying in five-star hotels, as promised, and then finding herself “in the middle of nowhere” in a small village near Valdai, she wrote to her prospective employers after they told her, in an e-mail, that she was not a good fit. In an exchange with Systema years later, she said the correspondence about the job had been conducted with a high level of secrecy and she had never been told who she would be working for.
Olesya Fedina (far left) and Yekaterina Golovacheva (third from left)
The trove of materials indicates that the search and hiring process and the financial arrangements with the men and women contracted to help raise and educate the boys has been handled largely by two cousins of Kabayeva’s, Olesya Fedina and Yekaterina Golovacheva.
Neither Fedina nor Golovacheva responded to questions sent by Systema. Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov and a representative of Kabayeva also ignored requests for comment.
Systema also sought comment from several of the people the materials indicated had been hired to help raise the two boys. One confirmed that she had been a governess in Russia for three months but was never told whom she was working for.
“We received our orders and information only via assistants of the family,” she told Systema, adding that “absolute discretion, loyalty, silence, and obedience” were expected of the hires.
She called her brief stint at the job an “outstanding experience” and said the family was always fair and “very generous,” but suggested interaction with the assistants was one-sided.
“I was just a person receiving commands and orders,” she said.
