Roving Periscope: In Russia, the enemies’ partners also hog the limelight!

Virendra Pandit 

New Delhi: As Russia completes two years of Ukraine invasion on February 24, its President Vladimir Putin’s latest ‘girlfriend’ is hogging all the limelight.  Another woman, the widow of his trenchant critic Alexei Navalny, who died last week, is also making headlines.

The media reported that President Putin, 71, has grown close to a “Barbie-lookalike”, who is 32 years younger than him, and is viewed as his chief censorship officer! Putin is contesting a third time to retain his presidency in polls scheduled in March and expects his ‘macho’ image will help him retain the Kremlin.

According to the New York Post, Ekaterina “Katya” Mizulina, 39, is an art historian who heads the pro-Kremlin Safe Internet League. The main part of her job is to stamp out criticism of Russia and its President, especially on the war against Ukraine.

She is the daughter of pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine Senator Elena Mizulina, 69.

“Katya Mizulina is completely to Putin’s taste. This Barbie type has always suited him very well,” Russian human rights campaigner Olga Romanova told Ukraine’s Channel 24.

President Putin divorced Lyudmila, his wife of 30 years, in 2014. Then he was rumored to be in a relationship with a former Olympic gymnast, Alina Kabaeva, with whom he was reported to have three children.

The Post said that Mizulina graduated from the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London in 2004 with degrees in art history and Indonesian language. She worked as a translator for official Russian delegations visiting China before joining the Safe Internet League in 2017.

“First, we will clean Ukraine from the Nazis… and then we will get to Google and Wikipedia,” she reportedly said in a speech in 2022.

A year after the Ukraine war started on February 24, 2022, the Independent reported the President was secretly spending millions on Kabaeva, who resides in a villa on Putin’s estate on Lake Valdai, about 400 km northwest of Moscow. But the President’s latest ‘affair’ has flummoxed many.

In another development, Putin’s critic Alexei Navalny’s partner has now stepped out of the shadows.

Yulia Navalnaya, 47, addressed the Russian opposition leaders on Monday, asking them to brace for a struggle against Putin.

A trained economist, Navalnaya gave up her job to raise the couple’s two children.

“I call on you to stand by me,” she said in a powerful nine-minute video that gathered around two and a half million views in a few hours.

For over a decade, her husband ran a campaign against Putin and his regime on issues like democracy and corruption.

Until now, Yulia stayed away from the media spotlight, maintaining as much privacy as she could while Alexei’s political career took off.

She stood by him as he galvanized mass protests in Russia, flying with him out of the country as he lay in a coma after an alleged poisoning in 2020. Five months later, she was defiant when the couple flew back to Moscow, knowing it would land him in jail.

Putin did not disappoint them. The couple were separated at passport control upon landing, the last time she saw her husband free.

They briefly embraced before police took him away and she was greeted at the airport with chants of “Yulia!”

The couple often shared photographs of their family life with their children — in stark contrast to Putin, who keeps his personal life in utter secrecy.

They last saw each other in February 2022, only speaking through letters as prison visits became forbidden during his 19-year prison sentence.

After Alexei’s “death” on Friday last, she burst out on Monday:

“Putin killed the father of my children. He took away the dearest thing I had, the closest and most beloved person.”

She had over the years seen her husband be arrested, poisoned, and abused.

After decades of resisting calls to take on a more active political role, she agreed to pick up the torch.

“The most important thing we can do for Alexei and ourselves is to continue to fight more desperately, more fiercely than before,” she said.