The Ministry of Defense. Before the war, as you may recall, we were told Russia had the world’s second-strongest army. Their missiles could destroy continents. Their professionalism and bravery would make any enemy tremble. The country was safe—sleep easy.
And those grand buildings, those churches and parades… And the medals on their chests for courage, for honor and valor, for heroism and service to the motherland. The Russian army, we were told, was no longer the ragged force of the 1990s—forget that. These were professional, perfectly trained, fully equipped, polite soldiers.
None of it was true. It never could have been true. It was never even meant to be. If you carefully peel away the stage props and the fiction, layer by layer, what remains is exactly what Putin’s regime is: a bunch of thieves, nothing more.
Let’s look at specific examples. Sergei Shoigu—it’s no longer clear whether he’s a minister or an oligarch; the head of the army who has nothing to do with the army. Oriental-style palaces, mistresses with state contracts, a son who’s a pop star—that, yes, that’s Shoigu. A wheeler-dealer who, for some reason, unleashed an aggressive war in our name.
Timur Ivanov is the army’s chief builder. In Mariupol, which they themselves destroyed, he puts up Potemkin villages (facade projects meant to create a false impression of prosperity). He lives off kickbacks from contractors, parties, lives it up, and builds himself an estate.
Alexei Krivoruchko came to the Defense Ministry from the arms business. As deputy minister, he oversees procurement—naturally, weapons procurement (from himself). His children, as we discovered, are U.S. citizens.
Ruslan Tsalikov is another clown in uniform—not a soldier, more like a Soviet-style political officer. Once he latched onto Shoigu at the Emergencies Ministry in 1994, they’ve been inseparable ever since. He has a house on Rublyovka worth a billion rubles. We found another billion rubles’ worth of real estate in his children’s names.
The tragedy is that before, they were simply stealing shamelessly, and now they’ve started a war. They never stopped stealing—they just started killing as well. These are the specific people who every day decide how many people to round up and send to the front.
This apartment block in Dnipro should be hit with several cruise missiles. That Ukrainian village should be seized. It’s already a bloody meat grinder there? No matter—let’s throw another thousand men into it; the settlement of Pisky is vitally important to us. The soldiers have nothing but rusty rifles and rotten food? No problem—they can improvise.
And today we’re going to tell you the story of another of Shoigu’s deputies, another general responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. A specific person, with a first name, last name, and biography. One of the most inconspicuous officials in the Defense Ministry, Shoigu’s loyal deputy, who has managed to stay out of the spotlight.
But even the tightest secrecy falls apart when love enters the picture—and not just for some abstract woman, but for a colleague, a major general… An office romance that not only exposed corruption, but also helped us learn how people in the Defense Ministry live and entertain themselves during wartime.
Our heroine in uniform today is Maria Kitaeva.
She is 39 years old; by training she is a journalist and an actress, having graduated from GITIS (the Russian Institute of Theatre Arts).
Maria is known as a TV presenter—she hosted the program *I Serve Russia* on the Zvezda channel and worked for Rossiya 24.
But how did a TV presenter end up with the shoulder boards of a major general? Excellent question.
We’ll need to revisit a few more nostalgic broadcasts. It’s 2010. Putin is driving across the country in a yellow Lada Kalina.
It was a PR stunt: Putin, driving himself, traveling along the new Khabarovsk–Chita highway like an ordinary person. And of course, showing how close he is to the people: here he stops to have some tea with truckers, there he asks about bread prices. The whole thing was meant to support the Russian auto industry—to encourage people to buy domestic cars.
But off camera, Putin’s huge motorcade consisted entirely of foreign-made cars:
And just to be safe, they brought along three yellow Lada Kalinas—so they could swap the car out if necessary.
Somewhere in the Amur region, a VGTRK reporter gets into the car with him. That reporter is Maria Kitaeva.
Please be careful watching this clip—it may be traumatic: there’s a ticker on the screen showing the dollar and euro exchange rates.
Three months later, in December 2010, we see the Kalina passenger in the studio—she is hosting Putin’s live call-in show.
And a year later as well. Though she’s not exactly great at it.
At the same time, Maria Kitaeva is making reports and documentary films. One of them turns out to be fateful.
The young reporter so impressed Shoigu, who had just been appointed governor of the Moscow region, that he invited her to work for him—as an adviser on information technology. In practice, she monitored the media and social networks; essentially, she worked in the press office.
As you may recall, Shoigu did not remain governor for long, and seven months later, in November 2012, he became defense minister. He took Kitaeva with him, appointing her to essentially the same role—adviser.
But unlike her previous job, her responsibilities were not disclosed. Presumably it was also something related to the media, but there are no public appearances to be found, and her name does not even appear on the Defense Ministry’s website.
Yet this vagueness and lack of clarity did absolutely nothing to prevent Maria Kitaeva from becoming the equivalent of a major general. In 2014, by Putin’s decree, she was granted the rank of Active State Councillor of the Russian Federation, 3rd class.
That rank is equivalent to that of major general—two huge stars on her shoulder boards. Maria had only just turned 30 at the time.
In fact, the situation really is highly unusual, and the internet is full of all sorts of indecent speculation and insinuation. It doesn’t help that absolutely nothing is known about Major General Kitaeva’s personal life.
There is, however, this photograph from the cover of Foma, an Orthodox Christian magazine.
It shows her church wedding ceremony with her former husband, Alexei Tuzov. They divorced almost immediately afterward. In the financial disclosures she has filed as a government official since 2012, she has had no spouse listed—and never has.
Children do appear there regularly, however: in 2014
In 2016
And another one in 2018
Let’s dispel the dirty rumors. The children are not Shoigu’s, of course, but they do belong to someone close to him. In 2020, the outlet Mediazona reported that by comparing disclosure filings, they had figured out who might be the father of Kitaeva’s children—and that person was Deputy Defense Minister Yury Sadovenko.
We can confirm that this is true. According to official documents, all three of her children bear the surname Sadovenko. They never registered a marriage.
Kitaeva and Sadovenko met when she was a journalist interviewing Shoigu. Sadovenko himself has been working with Shoigu since the mid-1990s—nearly 30 years. Here are archival photos of Shoigu when he headed the Emergencies Ministry, and there behind him, unfailingly, is Sadovenko.
He trails him like a shadow—apparently a bodyguard or an aide at the time; it’s not entirely clear.
In private conversations, Sadovenko calls Shoigu his second father and chief mentor. Sadovenko is, generally speaking, an airborne troops man: he was born in Zhytomyr, Ukraine, graduated from military school in Ryazan, served for only four years, and then moved straight to the Emergencies Ministry.
When Shoigu became governor of the Moscow region, he took Sadovenko with him, and Sadovenko headed the administration. Then Shoigu moved to the Defense Ministry—and Sadovenko went too, as a deputy minister. Though his position was not really military, but administrative—the chief of staff, essentially.
But that did absolutely nothing to stop him from covering himself in medals as if he had liberated Stalingrad, and from receiving the rank of colonel general.
But there is nothing surprising here: under a defense minister who never served, the less a general has actually served, the more highly he is valued.
Even less is known about Sadovenko than about Kitaeva. He has been living off Russian taxpayers for 30 years, yet he is in no hurry to provide any information about himself—as if it were none of our business.
But that’s all right—we’ll fix that today. If you look for video reports about Colonel General Sadovenko’s work, it seems that all he does is hand out awards and certificates. Last March he gave a speech at a funeral and presented a Hero’s Star. Yet for some reason he himself is in no rush to go fight Nazism.
So, what do we have? A family of two Defense Ministry officials and their three children. Now let’s take a look at how they live.
We don’t have to look far—there is Maria Kitaeva’s Instagram, with nearly 1,500 photos, enough to form a pretty good picture of how this general’s family lives.
Fashion shows and parties:
Foreign travel and entertainment:
Yachts and glamorous photo shoots:
Here on Maria Kitaeva’s wrist is a Breguet watch.
It costs $40,000—about 3.6 million rubles at today’s exchange rate.
Here is a Rolex worth $30,000, or 2.7 million rubles.
Here she is snowboarding in Courchevel in winter.
In summer she vacations by the sea in Italy.
And in the off-season, of course, Dubai.
And a pinch of patriotism—rapture over the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces (the one associated with Hitler’s cap and the Putin mosaic).
Tank-shaped slippers.
On Navy Day, they all dress up as sailors.
On Airborne Forces Day, they wear striped naval-style undershirts.
Sergei Kiriyenko.
And of course, the parade. The general’s wife dresses her young children in Soviet uniforms, side caps with the hammer and sickle, “we can do it again,” and so on.
She congratulates the children every month with exclusively military-patriotic cakes.
Kitaeva’s Instagram contains a great many photos of Shoigu and Putin, along with various flattering posts about them, congratulations, and so on. But there is not a single photo there of Deputy Minister Sadovenko himself, the father of her children.
It is very fortunate that we have obtained Major General Maria Kitaeva’s complete email archive spanning 17 years. In it, we will find photographs, documents, and far more detail about how the people live who are right now sending you, your acquaintances, your friends, and your relatives to kill and die in the trenches in Ukraine.
Here is the bill for renting a villa for one month in 2019 at the famous Italian resort of Forte dei Marmi. €32,000—almost 2.5 million rubles at the exchange rate at the time.
We find images of this villa online and compare them with Kitaeva’s Instagram. In a video with her son, we see a dark green curtain; we look at the villa photos—and it matches.
The window with the iron grate matches too, as does the vase hanging on a chain.
And here is another photo from there, taken on this curved staircase.
They actually vacation in Forte dei Marmi almost every summer. It feels like déjà vu! Six months ago, we published an investigation into another deputy defense minister—Timur Ivanov—and his wife, Svetlana Maniovich. And it was the same there: every summer, Saint-Tropez.
And for the family of this deputy defense minister, whose wife is not just a socialite but a major general herself, it’s Forte dei Marmi. But we’ll come back to Timur Ivanov—read to the end, as they say; there will be plenty of surprises.
We found a whole collection of airline tickets from Moscow to Pisa (the nearest airport to Forte dei Marmi)—they were there in July 2013.
And again in August.
In the summer of 2015, Shoigu’s adviser went not to annexed Alushta in Crimea, but to Italy again, with a stop in Amsterdam as well.
July 2016 and August 2017—Italy again.
Once more in spring 2018.
And in 2019.
But that is their summer vacation. In winter, they have a lovely tradition of going to Vienna. To stroll through Christmas markets. One is tempted to ask: what’s wrong with the fairs in Vologda or Kostroma? You dress your children in Soviet uniforms—shouldn’t you be a bit more patriotic?
They went to Vienna in May 2011.
Then in December 2016.
And twice in 2019, in May and December.
The same with Dubai: two trips in 2021.
As well as in the fall of 2020 and 2019.
In 2018, Kitaeva, her two children, and their nanny spent a month at the five-star Sofitel The Palm Dubai.
That cost Kitaeva 1.5 million rubles.
And there is one more trip, a special one. Everyone remembers that day—where they were and what they were doing. February 24, 2022, the start of the full-scale war against Ukraine. At dawn, Putin is bombing Kyiv.
Shoigu’s adviser, together with the deputy defense minister’s children, is… in London. She flew there for a vacation and saw no need to cut it short. After all, she had tickets for February 26 to the musical *Mary Poppins*. Wouldn’t want to miss that.
Now to other expenses: this is a statement from a supplementary card linked to Deputy Defense Minister Sadovenko’s account at VTB.
Maria Kitaeva has a separate card for “pin money.”
Maria goes to TSUM (Moscow’s luxury department store) and spends almost 700,000 rubles there in a single day. Then a week later, back to TSUM—another nearly 200,000, almost a million rubles in a month. And then suddenly—someone walks into a bank branch and deposits 900,000 into her account. Government officials? Required to disclose income? Account for every kopek? No, apparently they’ve never heard of such a thing.
We should note, so that no one accuses us of bias later, that Shoigu’s adviser Kitaeva does have a fairly wealthy brother—Denis Kitaev.
Together with a partner, he has a real estate development business in Moscow. They build luxury residential complexes. But here, as always, there is one big “but.” And that is Denis and Maria Kitaeva’s mother. Her name is Nina Kitaeva.
And the gentlemen standing next to her are Yury Luzhkov and Vladimir Resin. Starting to get the picture?
For many years, Nina Kitaeva worked as deputy to Vladimir Resin, the longtime head of Moscow’s construction complex (he is now a State Duma deputy). He himself called her his right hand. Not a single major construction project in Moscow passed without her involvement. From building housing for people on waiting lists and reconstructing cultural sites to drafting Moscow’s master plan—Nina Kitaeva was responsible for all of it for many years.
Judging by the photographs and the celebrations of her birthdays, there is not a single official or developer in Moscow with whom Ninochka—as they call her—is not on close terms.
This kind of magazine was once prepared for the birthday girl.
It includes “rules for life” such as “money loves silence” and “you can’t forbid living beautifully.”
And even society gossip.
Here Kitaeva is dancing with one of Moscow’s biggest developers—Chigirinsky.
Posing for a photo with fashion designer Valentino.
With Viner and Kabaeva.
With Zurab Tsereteli.
With Naina Yeltsina
Hugging Kobzon.
And Valentin Gaft dedicates poems to her.
In short, everyone loves Ninochka Kitaeva; she is the true head of the family. And what Kitaeva herself loves is listed in another section of the magazine. There are various household items, a Chanel bag, a Franck Muller watch, and the Kitaev family estate.
Of course—what official is complete without a private estate? Naturally, one located on Rublyovka. Here is a house measuring 1,100 square meters with a plot of land beneath it of nearly half a hectare.
Thanks to such an energetic builder mother, the Kitaev family has done very well in Moscow real estate. A huge apartment on Arbat, apparently from Moscow City Hall.
Two large neighboring apartments in Khamovniki with a total area of 360 square meters.
On 3rd Samotechny Lane they have 223 square meters. On Plyushchikha, an apartment of nearly 300 square meters.
And then there are smaller properties here and there. This far-from-complete list of residential real estate alone comes to nearly 2 billion rubles. So much for a family of public officials.
Celebrating birthdays in grand style is a Kitaev family tradition. For Maria Kitaeva’s 30th birthday, there were nearly 100 guests—nothing but high society.
You might even think this was not a birthday party but a ceremonial convention of the heroes of our investigations. At the first table: Shoigu’s deputies and her former boss, VGTRK chief Oleg Dobrodeev. At the neighboring table: Dmitry Peskov with the birthday girl’s parents; farther on, the family of Moscow developer Chigirinsky, Resin’s successor Marat Khusnullin, and propagandists Solovyov and Brilyov.
Also in the hall were family friend Valentin Gaft, singer Zemfira, Ksenia Shoigu, and Timur Ivanov, apparently with his wife Maniovich.
There is one more episode, a small one, but impossible to ignore. In July 2016, Maria Kitaeva was, naturally, in Forte dei Marmi (no surprises there). Maria was seven months pregnant with her second daughter when something went wrong with her health and she went into premature labor.
She was taken to an Italian hospital, but it was quickly decided that she should be transported to Moscow after all. Perhaps they did not want a deputy defense minister’s child to be born in Italy—this was already after the annexation of Crimea and after the downing of the airliner; Sadovenko was most likely barred from travel.
So Maria had to be flown to Moscow on a private medical aircraft. From an email, we learn that Sadovenko himself and the godfather handled the arrangements and the search for a plane.
Judging by the christening photos, the godfather was Timur Ivanov.
And do you know who paid for the private plane for the child of the deputy defense minister and his partner, Shoigu’s adviser? Yevgeny Prigozhin.
The situation really was dangerous, with enormous risk to both mother and child, and in that sense Prigozhin may quite literally have saved their lives. Which raises the question of who owed whom.
Let me tell you, Yury’s apparatus Is such that it makes the whole Ministry tremble… That apparatus can be compared to a typhoon, a storm, Leaving its mark in your guts and in your heart! And not just your heart! Your ass is always sweating… The minister keeps setting new tasks… We’ve forgotten about rest, about our families… From the strain, I laugh one moment and cry the next…
This is an excerpt from the script for Yury Sadovenko’s юбилей (milestone birthday celebration): he was turning 45, and it was celebrated in grand style. Maria Kitaeva’s email contains many messages that allow us to imagine how generals in the Defense Ministry entertain themselves. For example, a special file with the deputy minister’s biography and amusing facts about the birthday man: that he likes sausage sandwiches and hot dogs, and likes singing “White Swan on the Pond” and “The Blue Has Spilled Wide” at karaoke. And here is what he does not like: tapered trousers and shorts. A man cannot wear such things! And women should have long hair.
Very high-ranking guests were present at the celebration. Table No. 1: the birthday man Sadovenko, Kitaeva, and with them Sergei Shoigu with his daughter Ksenia, Valery Gerasimov, deputy minister Tsalikov, and presidential chief of staff Vaino.
At Table No. 5: Putin’s former bodyguard and now governor of Tula region, Dyumin, and Klimentyev, deputy director of the Federal Protective Service. At the neighboring table, unexpectedly, 26-year-old Igor Chaika.
Everyone takes turns speaking; during the breaks, the master of ceremonies recites poetry while Levon Oganesov provides accompaniment. The highlight of the program is announced as a musical number by the show-boy group The Singing Thrushes. To quote: “The group performs a popular repertoire with elements of provocative body movements and pantomime.”
The lineup of the show-boy group The Singing Thrushes consists of the now-familiar Timur Ivanov, his deputy—the head of the Defense Ministry’s Property Relations Department—Dmitry Kurakin, and Kurakin’s own deputy, Daniil Sukhanov.
Kurakin, incidentally, is currently being held in pretrial detention, while Sukhanov is wanted. Both are defendants in a criminal case involving fraud with military property.
And eight years later, Sadovenko’s partner, Maria Kitaeva, would leave him for the third thrush—Timur Ivanov.
Please forgive this *Dom-2*-style drama (*Dom-2* is a notorious Russian reality TV show); believe us, we were surprised ourselves. But that’s just how eventful life is at the Ministry of Defense. For those who are confused: there is Deputy Defense Minister Colonel General Sadovenko. He was de facto married to the defense minister’s adviser, Major General Kitaeva. They had three children together.
And then, quite recently, it appears she left him for another deputy defense minister, Timur Ivanov, who less than a year earlier had divorced socialite Svetlana Maniovich.
Here are a few photos that leave no doubt.
Vacations together, ski trips.
And this photo was taken on the anniversary of the start of the war — 24 February 2023.
Some of these pictures are strikingly similar to what we showed you in our previous investigation into Ivanov and Maniovich. The same glamorous parties and clubs.
The same Pavlov Posad shawls (traditional Russian patterned shawls).
And the same family photo shoots.
A real *Santa Barbara*. And in this photo, Kitaeva even seems to be wearing a ring — perhaps the happy couple should be congratulated.
For New Year’s, Kitaeva arranged a surprise for her beloved — she bought pajamas with initials embroidered on the collar: MK (Maria Kitaeva) and TI (Timur Ivanov).
In early November 2022, Kitaeva ordered joint calling cards with Ivanov.
In gold cursive lettering they read: “With best wishes, Timur and Maria” — they now give gifts together.
All of this is rather reckless. Less than a month earlier, Timur Ivanov had been placed under sanctions. And something tells us Maria still very much wants to go to Europe.
This year, she applied for Hungarian Schengen visas for her entire family.
They buy a set of tickets to Budapest — for Maria Kitaeva, her mother, and all three children. Nearly half a million rubles.
And they book two two-room suites for a week at this lovely hotel in central Budapest. That costs around 650,000 rubles.
Kitaeva is no longer officially employed by the Defense Ministry; she has moved to work as a PR adviser at the Tretyakov Gallery. Even so, she decides to play it safe: in the application form, she writes that this trip — and all trips to Europe over the next five years — will be paid for not by her, but by her mother, Nina Kitaeva.
Maria Kitaeva does face risks, and significant ones — she has already been included in Canadian sanctions. Now that it has become clear that she has a new family with Deputy Defense Minister Ivanov (who oversees construction in the occupied territories), she really should have been barred from entering Europe.
But unfortunately, for now, nothing prevents her — a major general, a person who spent a decade working at the Ministry of Defense — from vacationing in Europe. Unlike ordinary Russians. In April of this year, after a layover in Istanbul, she flew to Budapest.
But apparently she also made a stop in Italy. Here is a receipt from either an Italian gallery or a shop, where a purchase of €17,000 — or 1.7 million rubles — was paid for with Kitaeva’s card.
That is the story — one that seemed impossible in the 18th month of the war, yet it is reality. Unpunished war criminals and their families roam around Europe. Shoigu’s aide, whose family life is first with one sitting deputy defense minister and then another, does not care about the war at all.
You will not see even a hint on her Instagram that anything is wrong. For them, life goes on — travel, parties, and shopping abroad. Europe, unfortunately, welcomes them with open arms. Both Timur Ivanov’s former family, living at least in part on alimony from a war criminal, and his new one, which, if you add it all up, includes six generals’ children, two major generals, and a mother who is an official at Moscow City Hall.
This is wrong, unjust, and frankly infuriating. But we are not going to put up with it, turn a blind eye, or throw up our hands and say, well, it’s obvious, everyone steals anyway.
And neither should you. We must give no peace to those involved in this terrible war. We must make life impossible for these corrupt military elites. For what they have done to the lives of peaceful Ukrainians, to Russians sent to the slaughter, and to the country itself. And even if, for now, while their leader Putin remains in power, it is impossible to imprison or punish them — the time will come, and everything will change.
And with stories like this, we must make sure everyone knows who these people are and what they are responsible for. Help spread this investigation. Show it especially to those who support the war.
We do not have weapons or tanks, and we cannot march on Moscow in a column, but we do have the determination to put an end to this lawlessness and abuse. Information and truth are our only weapons right now.
If you know anything about officials in the Defense Ministry, the General Staff, any military commanders, and above all Shoigu, send it to us. There is a special website where you can send us messages and files anonymously. There is a Telegram bot, and there is email: blackbox@fbk.info. We will find a way to verify the information and publish it.
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