14 DAY TRIAL // The Russian President, Vladimir Putin, has informally announced his divorce from wife Lyudmila Putina by removing all mentions to her from his official biography on the Kremlin website.
The Telegraph speculates that this is a sure indication that the divorce has been finalized, after it was first announced last year in June. Dmitry Peskov, Putin's spokesman, later confirmed the news to Russian media that this editing should be taken as a sign “the divorce took place.”
As a result, Lyudmila was effectively removed from the President's life, as people struggled to find any reference to her in the new description, or at least a hint after 30 years of marriage. At the moment, the only indication that Putin was ever in a relationship is the fact that he has two daughters listed on the site as Maria and Katerina.
Speculation about the crumbling marriage of the most powerful man in Russia has been frequent, especially in the last years, as an affair with Olympic gymnast Alina Kabaeva became widely accepted as fact.
Putin and his wife Lyudmilla Shkrebneva, met in the early 1980s as students at the Leningrad State University. They were married in 1983 and two years later, in 1985, their first daughter, Maria, was born. Only a year later, their second daughter, Katerina, was also born.
For most of the 1980s, the couple lived in East Germany, in the city of Dresden, where Putin worked for the KGB, only to move to Leningrad in 1990, just as the city changed its name to Saint Petersburg.
While her husband's political career was proving to be successful, Putina chose a more low-key career, teaching German at the Leningrad State University. She seldom gave official comments, and when she did, they were mostly about supporting her husband's state policies.
Speculation about their failing marriage began to arise as soon as Putina failed to make any public appearances with her husband, during his second term as president. Last year, in June, the couple announced that they would be splitting in a staged interview that took place on national television.
While Putin admitted that it was a common decision taken because they had grown separate from each other, Putina mentioned that she loathed flying and that her husband was constantly “drowned in work.”
The affair with Alina Kabaeva, the young beautiful gymnast who this year has somehow managed to land herself among the Russian athletes that carried the Olympic torch for the last stretch at the Sochi Olympics, has always been a kind of an open secret among state officials in Russia. Everyone knew about it, but nobody said anything.
An indication as to why that might be is the fact that the Russian newspaper Moskovsky Korrespondent was promptly closed down after it published an article in which it was claimed that Mr. Putin was planning a divorce from his current wife and then a marriage to Kabaeva.