Russian President Vladimir Putin visited a military aviation academy to meet a group of “young female pilots” who found themselves in an unusual conversation about health, beauty, and the emotional burdens of leadership.
“And taking care of one’s health is always important,” Putin told the women. “And not only does it have a personal but also a national dimension.”
It was a charming scene, if Russian state media should be believed, as Putin exposed his “secrets to [a] long, healthy life.” The Kremlin chief, 71, dispensed his beneficences “with a smile,” as Tass noted more than once, and he commended to the young women the benefits of “cold showers” for health.
“You know, I remember when I was a kid in Leningrad, we didn’t even have a bathroom in our communal apartment,” Putin recalled. “Still, I went outside in winter and rubbed myself with snow.”
Putin emphasized his confidence that the graduates would “continue the wonderful traditions of this pilot training school” while acknowledging the imaginative gulf between them and outsiders.
“Of course, the uninitiated tend to link aviation with romantic blue skies,” he said, per a Kremlin transcript. “However, you have probably felt that there is something more to it, apart from the romance. Well, of course, it is impossible to do without the omnipresent romance here.”
Putin kept the focus on business, including his efforts under the burdens of authority.
“Even when I am with my loved ones, I try not to show any signs of stress, and on the contrary, I pretend that everything is fine,” he said. “The most vivid events are, of course, meetings with our men or with our women, our girls who serve in the special military operation, or with members of their families. Frankly, I try not to show emotion, but still, these events, these meetings have the brightest emotional coloring.”
Putin has expanded that circle in recent decades. He has two children with his ex-wife, Lyudmila. They announced their divorce in 2013. As early as 2008, though, he faced public questions about his relationship with rumored mistress Alina Kabaeva, a former Olympic gold medalist whose gymnastic exploits earned her a reputation as “Russia’s most flexible woman” and provided a springboard into parliament as a member of Putin’s political party. U.S. officials noted her “close relationship with Putin” as a justification for putting her on a Treasury Department blacklist in 2022.
Kabaeva “is thought to have had at least three children with” Putin. That’s not the extent of his family, according to the late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny, who published financial documents that he characterized as proving that a former cleaning lady has grown very wealthy, courtesy of Putin’s associates, in the years since giving birth to a girl with a striking resemblance to the Kremlin chief.
“The life of a polygamist brings not only pleasures but also problems,” Navalny said in the final investigation that he published before returning to Russia in 2021, where he was imprisoned until his death last month. “That’s not so bad, to have three wives. But it’s much worse on the other hand: After all, Putin also has three mothers-in-law — at least three.”
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At Krasnodar Higher Military Aviation School of Pilots, however, Putin struck a more conventional note.
“I wish you every success in your careers, a happy family life, and marital bliss,” he said.
