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Navalny team found Lyudmila Putina's LiveJournal blog, where she complained about her husband and took psychological tests

The Insider

Alexei Navalny's team has published an investigation into Putin's ex-wife Lyudmila, who after her new marriage goes by the surname Ochertnaya. The investigators claim she started a LiveJournal blog in 2006 under the nickname llenaa, diminishing her age by 10 years.

The fact that Putina's and llenaa's biographies match even in minutest detail point to the fact that it is indeed her blog: llenaa mentions she has two daughters, one of them an avid dancer, she herself lived and studied in St. Petersburg with a degree in philology and her zodiac is Capricorn. User llenaa writes she worked as a turner, she’s fond of skiing and playing tennis - this is also part of Putina's biography. Both went to see Ostrovsky's Thunderstorm at the Sovremennik theater, and both own white Toy Poodles. There are other coincidences: llenaa writes she watched a strip show on the Ripperbahn (a street in Hamburg). A book by a German journalist close to Putin says that Putin and his friends and their wives went to an erotic show in St. Pauli, Germany. The Ripperbahn is the main street in the area, the investigators note.

In her blog, llenaa writes that she is frankly bored and has nothing to do. She tried yoga, got into psychology, took tests to learn “what kind of tattoo would suit you,” “what kind of drink you are in sex” and to determine the psychological age. She complained about her husband “drinking her blood.”

The investigators found not only the blog, but also two of Putina's apartments in Spain, worth more than €2 million. Lyudmila and her new husband, Arthur Ocheretniy, also own a 450-square-meter villa on the French Riviera worth €5.3 million, according to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) 2017 report. Ocheretniy owns several upscale real properties in Europe. He owns two villas in Biarritz, an apartment in Davos and two apartments in Malaga. The total value of that property is nearly 596 million rubles, the investigators say.

President Vladimir Putin’s ex-wife is not poor either. She owns a mansion near the Kremlin dating back to 1774, which is being rented out to Sberbank, VTB and other business entities. It brings her more than 250 million rubles a year, the investigators say. In addition, Ochertnaya (Putina) has a foundation, which is officially headed by her new husband. The foundation is financed by the Moscow mayor's office, Gazprombank, and Severstal, bringing her another 415 million rubles a year.