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The European Union is considering including

the two daughters of Vladimir Putin, Maria and Katerina, on the

new list of sanctions against Russia

for the massacres of Ukrainian civilians ,

according to the Bloomberg news agency.

According to this information, the decision to include the daughters of the Russian dictator has not yet been adopted, and if so, it should be ratified by all the members of the bloc, something that is not clear that it will happen.

In any case, the mere fact that Brussels is considering acting on the personal finances of the two 'czarinas', as a detailed investigation by the Reuters news agency described them in 2015, seems to indicate that the EU wants to

send a message of warning to Putin.

The lives of Putin's two daughters are shrouded in secrecy, although there are three key elements that they share with the rest of the Russian elite:

they are very rich;

they are very powerful;

and have spent their lives straddling their country and Western Europe.

Thus, the fact that it is the most important European institution that has proposed sanctioning them is not without a certain ironic touch.

Putin's youngest daughter is named

Katerina, and she is 35 years old

.

Between 2013 and 2018 she was married to the billionaire

Kiril Shamalov,

son of the oligarch

Nikolai Shamalov,

one of the main shareholders of the Rossiya bank, considered by Western countries as "the financial entity of the Russian elite", and of the oil and gas giant. Sibur gas.

The couple owned, among other assets,

a house valued at 3.7 million dollars, in Biarritz, in the French Basque Country,

which they bought from Genadi Timchenko, another old friend of the Russian president.

In 2015, Reuters estimated Kiril and Maria's net worth at around

€1.8 billion.

Kiril Shamalov hails from the group of Putin allies from the time he was running municipal politics in St. Petersburg in the 1990s.

He has made all the fortune from it after Putin came to power.

Katerina was born in the German city of Dresden when Vladimir Putin was a spy for the KGB, the Soviet political police.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall the family moved to Saint Petersburg, but both she and her sister were sent back to Germany, where they received most of their education.

The person in charge of watching over them was

the former Stasi agent Mathias Warnig.

Warnig would later become the CEO of the Switzerland-based company Nord Stream, which built the controversial

Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline,

from Russia to Germany, a project defended by three German chancellors: the socialists Gerhard Schroeder and Olaf Scholz, and the conservative Angela Merkel.

In yet another illustration of the links between the German elite and the Putin regime, Schroeder has been working for Nord Stream since he left politics 17 years ago.

Putin's youngest daughter

is a physicist and mathematician,

and works at Nomenko, a company that is developing a private project in the health sector.

In the past, she has been

an acrobatic dancer,

which may have had something to do with the Russian government's decision to build a complex for the practice of that discipline worth 2,000 million rubles (22 million euros).

Putin's eldest daughter is named

Maria

, and she turns 37 on the 28th of this month.

She is

a doctor

and, according to Bloomberg.

He heads a center for Artificial Intelligence (AI) at Moscow University.

Her husband is the Dutch businessman

Jorrit Faasen,

with whom she, in fact, lived in Holland, in the town of Voorschoten, a high-class area near The Hague.

Both seem to have left the Netherlands for Moscow when in 2015 Russia shot down a passenger plane en route from the Netherlands to Malaysia over Ukraine, killing all 298 on board.

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