Maria Vorontsova (Russian: Мария Воронцова, née Mariya Vladimirovna Putina, Мария Владимировна Путина; born 28 April 1985), also referred to as Maria Faassen,^[1][2] is a Russian pediatric endocrinologist.^[3] She is the eldest child of Russian president Vladimir Putin.^[1][4]

Early life

Vorontsova was born in Leningrad, Russian SFSR (now Saint Petersburg, Russia),^[5] the eldest daughter of Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina (née Shkrebneva).^[1] She attended German school at Dresden, East Germany, while her family lived there in the 1980s. After her family moved to St. Petersburg in the spring of 1991, she attended Peterschule (Russian: «Петершуле»), a German gymnasium in St. Petersburg. Later, during violent gang wars involving the Tambov Gang while it was taking control of St. Petersburg's energy trade, she and her sister Katerina were sent by their father, who feared for their safety, to Germany where their legal guardian was former Stasi Matthias Warnig, who had worked with their father in Dresden as part of a KGB cell and established the Dresdner Bank branch in St Petersburg.^[6]

She played the violin for a Russian consulate general of Hamburg sponsored diplomatic breakfast in 1995.^[7][8][9] Later, after her family moved to Moscow, she attended the German School Moscow, a school closely associated with the German Embassy in Moscow for children of diplomats which had many students with families from Switzerland, Austria, and Germany. She graduated after 11 years of school. Three years later, she began her university studies enrolling together with Katerina as first year students.^{[5][10][11][12][13]}

Studies

Vorontsova studied biology at Saint Petersburg State University^[14] and is a graduate of medicine at Moscow State University in 2011.^[1][15] With Ivan Ivanovich Dedov (Russian: Иван Иванович Дедов) as her advisor, she was a PhD candidate at the Endocrinology Research Centre in Moscow, headed by Dedov and which runs the charity project Alfa-Endo, for children with endocrine diseases.^[15] Alfa-Endo is funded by Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman's Alfa-Bank of the Alfa Group.^[1]

Between 2013 and 2015, Vorontsova co-authored five studies including "The status of blood antioxidant system in patients with active acromegaly". She also, in 2015, co-authored a book about idiopathic stunting in children.^[1] Vorontsova is credited to be Putin's advisor in genetic engineering, especially in the usage of CRISPR to create genetically-engineered babies.^[16]

Personal life

Vorontsova is married to Dutch businessman Jorrit Joost Faassen^[1] (born 1979/80^[17]). He is from the family of the Dutch painter Casper Faassen.^[17] He studied architecture at the Hague University of Applied Sciences and graduated in 2004.^[18][15] On 15 April 2006, he moved to Moscow where he had been a director at Stroytransgaz but left that post to take a top posting in 2007 at Gazprom,^[17][15] where he no longer works.^[1] He was the deputy chairman of MEF Audit, a Russian consulting group, until mid 2015 when MEF Audit removed his name from their website.^[1][15]

On 14 November 2010, along the Rublevskoye Highway (Russian: Рублёвское шоссе) near Moscow, Jorrit Faassen was beaten by four bodyguards of the Russian banker Matvey Urin, the co-owner of Trado-Bank (Russian: АКБ «Традо-Банка» (ЗАО)), previously the head of Breeze Bank (Russian: «Бриз-Банка») and associated with four other Moscow banks all six of which subsequently went bankrupt.^{[17][19][20][21][22][23]} Since a half hour after this occurred, Urin has been detained and later incarcerated at Butyrka and has lost his wealth and vast holdings.^[24]

In 2013, Vorontsova and Faassen were living in a penthouse atop the highest residential building in Voorschoten in the Netherlands.^[18][17] In 2014, Dutch residents called for Vorontsova to be expelled from the country after Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was shot down by pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine.^[25] In 2015, Vorontsova and Faassen were reported to be living in Moscow.^[1]

Interests

In 2016, Vorontsova's favorite writers included Aldous Huxley, Arthur Golden, and Hermann Hesse. She enjoyed the films Dune, The Matrix, and Chocolat.^[15]

While attending graduate school in Moscow, she and her friends enjoyed activities at the Austrian resort village Bad Gastein, also known as the "Alpine Monte Carlo" (Russian: «альпийский Монте-Карло»).^[15]