Do you know how much an ordinary doctor in Russia earns these days? Let’s narrow it down even further: do you know how much endocrinologists, for example, make? Obviously, they’re hardly swimming in money, and stories about Russian endocrinologists partying on yachts in Monaco are not exactly shaking up the celebrity pages.
Still, what kind of money are we talking about?
An endocrinologist in the village of Krasny Yar can expect a salary of no more than 25,000 rubles. And that’s before taxes; after deductions, they’d have less than 22,000 rubles left to live on.
Things are slightly better for a colleague in Samara — he can earn from 30,000 rubles. But that still doesn’t leave much room to breathe.
Nor is an endocrinologist at the Omsk Regional Clinical Hospital likely to live large on a salary of 23,000 to 32,000 rubles. In short, despite how difficult and important the profession is, after a quarter-century of Vladimir Putin’s rule, they still haven’t started paying decent money there. But there are exceptions.
A few years ago, screenshots from a chat of graduates of Moscow State University’s Faculty of Fundamental Medicine were published online. At first glance, nothing unusual. People sharing updates from their lives, discussing science, the news, politics. A perfectly ordinary story.
That was the case until one graduate of the faculty appeared in the chat — endocrinologist Maria V. Since then, the steady routine of medical life was periodically spiced up by her stories about her passion for cars, including how she cheerfully “smashed” her Porsche into concrete:
About how Maria V. tries to travel as much as possible:
About the West, deviously preventing Russia from becoming prosperous:
About technologies for manipulating mass consciousness:
Maria V. is generally very interested in politics. And her language, you know, sounds awfully familiar. She writes about how NATO “oinked”:
About how you can quietly snatch a bit of territory:
And according to Maria, people in Russia live in exceptional prosperity. By the mid-2000s, it turns out, the average family could already afford to own one or two cars:
And sanctions don’t just fail to hurt Russia — they actually help it, because now we have our own mozzarella. Could anyone have imagined that in the 1990s?
People in the chat don’t argue with Maria much. They’re wary of dragging her back to the harsh reality where her fellow endocrinologists earn 20,000 to 30,000 rubles a month. Because everyone in the chat knows they’re not talking to just any Maria V., but to Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova, Vladimir Putin’s elder daughter, one of those famous “these women.”
In honor of the Year of the Family declared by Putin, let’s talk about his own family. The situation is outrageous: he’s a public politician, running in elections, and yet officially nothing at all is known about his family.
Here is the newly elected president of Montenegro showing on Instagram how he decorated a Christmas tree with his children:
Here are Erdoğan’s children, and here are the children of UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak — you can Google all of them in a second.
But Putin has been in power for 24 years and has never once shown his closest relatives in public — he keeps them hidden. You can find one miserable family photo with a daughter.
By the way, that isn’t his daughter.
But on federal TV channels, they constantly show us a certain Maria Vorontsova, without ever explaining who she is. This previously unknown pediatric endocrinologist, Maria Vorontsova, was first shown in 2018, when she traveled to a conference in Greece:
They showed how in 2019 she spoke at the “Path to Success” conference:
How she went to a conference in Austria:
How she spoke at a conference at Moscow State University.
And since then, the number of her TV appearances has been growing at an alarming rate every year. This young woman, an endocrinologist, is now practically impossible to get off television. But for some reason, they never say who she really is.
So let’s take a look at what Vladimir Putin’s elder daughter does and how much she earns.
Let’s not drag this out any longer — we know you’re dying to know. Putin’s daughter Maria Vorontsova officially works at Moscow State University, at her alma mater, the Faculty of Fundamental Medicine, and until recently was earning about 110,000 rubles a month there. So far, it doesn’t exactly smell like Putin-style billions...
All right, she also gets another 35,000 rubles from the Russian Association of Endocrinologists. Still not much!
She also receives another 48,000 rubles a month from the National Medical Research Center for Endocrinology of the Ministry of Health. That is still not much by Putin-family standards, although in fact it is already four times the average doctor’s salary in Russia.
Any doctor will tell you that it’s impossible to survive on a single salary, especially if you’re a young specialist. They’re always taking side work: some pick up extra shifts, some take additional positions, some moonlight in private clinics. Otherwise, it just doesn’t work; that’s the life of a young doctor — you have to hustle. And our Maria hustles too.
In 2019, Maria Vorontsova became a businesswoman and founded a company called NOMEKO, short for “New Medical Company.”
She took on the proud title of “Member of the Board of Directors.”
We’ll admit it: we spent a long time trying to figure out what they actually do. What is it they come into the office and do all day? We went to the website, and it says the company’s goals include: “creating an interaction interface between leading research organizations and medical institutions,” “developing new diagnostic methods in the field of nuclear medicine,” “implementing advanced technologies,” “creating a modern system for training doctors,” and “creating IT platforms.”
In short, it sounds impressive — a real breakthrough, you’d think. It’s just a little strange that these grand projects are being carried out by a staff of only five people; before the war there were six. Apparently one of them was drafted.
And in the company’s news section, instead of anything substantive, it’s one endless holiday: Victory Day, Russia Day, March 8, February 23, Christmas, Medical Worker’s Day. And then back around again: Russia Day, Victory Day, March 8, February 23.
But don’t worry: even five people — one of whom is clearly in charge of maintaining the holiday calendar — are quite enough to carry out the company’s main project, the one mysteriously not described on the website: pumping money into the pocket of Putin’s daughter Maria Vorontsova.
In 2020, shortly after it was founded, NOMEKO posted revenue of nearly 1 billion rubles — 840 million, to be exact. They absolutely should have been named businesspeople of the year, because most of that — 600 million — was pure profit. A 70% margin: these are the people who should be the country’s top business coaches.
And 232 million rubles of that net profit was paid out to shareholder Maria Vorontsova in dividends.
And she was rewarded for such effective work with a salary as well: pediatric endocrinologist Maria Vorontsova receives about 700,000 rubles a month from NOMEKO.
In 2021, NOMEKO’s net profit was even higher — 810 million rubles. In 2022, it was 855 million.
Here we can’t say for certain yet, because fresh data is not available, but if dividends were paid out the same way as in 2020, then our business lady received a total of 910 million rubles in dividends and another 33 million in salary. That’s 944 million rubles!
And one more important question: who is financing a company whose only apparent activity is writing holiday news posts and funding Putin’s daughter’s lavish lifestyle? All the money in Vorontsova’s company came from the SOGAZ clinic.
The clinic is known for having treated mercenaries from the Wagner PMC (a Russian private military company), and it was also where escorts for top Russian officials underwent medical examinations. Billions came from there to Vorontsova for “information modeling services for project implementation.”
The SOGAZ clinic’s generosity and involvement in state affairs are easy to explain: among its owners was Putin’s friend Yury Kovalchuk.
And also Putin’s nephew, photographer Mikhail Shelomov.
And after the war began, the clinic was transferred outright to people close to Maria Vorontsova — top managers at her company NOMEKO. So now she is the one in charge of escorts and mercenaries.
Now that we’ve sorted out her sources of income, let’s look at where pediatric doctor Maria Vorontsova lives. After separating from her Dutch husband, Jorrit Faassen, around 2016, Maria Vorontsova found new love — a 28-year-old Moscow manager named Yevgeny Nagorny. There was, by the way, an excellent investigation about him at one point.
Nagorny is three years younger than Maria. He studied at the Moscow Finance and Law Academy, worked at a customs company, and then at a fertilizer manufacturer:
But after meeting Vorontsova, his life took off. He went to work for Novatek, a company owned by Putin’s friend Gennady Timchenko — the very same man who gave Putin the yacht Scheherazade — and Leonid Mikhelson, the very same man who gave Dmitry Medvedev an estate in Plyos.
Nagorny’s official salary from Putin’s friends is quite substantial — about 760,000 rubles a month.
But even a salary like that would never have been enough for this purchase. In 2020, Nagorny acquired an apartment in one of Moscow’s most expensive buildings.
He bought a 230-square-meter penthouse in the elite Barkli Gallery residential complex in the very center of the city.
The developers call it a “Collector’s Building.” The collection includes 43 luxury apartments designed by a British architectural firm. It’s a 10-minute walk to the Kremlin and one minute to the Tretyakov Gallery.
The building is thematic: there are references to art everywhere. We’re not quite sure how you can write this about a building completed in 2018, but they claim its history begins in 1911, during Diaghilev’s “Russian Seasons” (the famous early-20th-century Russian ballet and arts tours in Europe). All residents are given a gold card to the Tretyakov Gallery.
The apartments here were sold fully finished, with ceiling heights of 3.5 to 4 meters, wooden fireplaces, and huge floor-to-ceiling windows.
And the especially luxurious apartments even have private terraces. Putin’s daughter, of course, has one of those.
And their apartment, owned by her and her husband, is now worth 800 million rubles. An endocrinologist from the Samara region would have to work 3,030 years to buy one like it!
An 800-million-ruble penthouse is nice, but for someone with Vladimir Putin’s blood in their veins, it is of course a mere trifle. There is also a country house on Rublyovka (Moscow’s elite suburban enclave), which we were led to by an adjutant.
“A what?!” you may ask. An adjutant! Maria Vorontsova, who officially has nothing to do with Putin, has her own adjutant. That is exactly how Ilya Bazlov is listed in phone contact books.
He orders food for Maria to her 800-million-ruble apartment:
And to cottage community Usovo Plus, house 16. He placed orders there at least 11 times!
Here is the house on satellite imagery. It is located 160 meters from Vladimir Putin’s Novo-Ogaryovo residence. It is worth about 400 million rubles.
In the university chat, Maria tells her former classmates how much she loves traveling. She is constantly going places: Pskov, Valdai, Veliky Novgorod, Irkutsk, Gorno-Altaysk. All the destinations are within Russia; one can assume that traveling abroad during the war is not especially safe for her right now.
But her 11-year-old son from her first marriage to the Dutchman Jorrit Faassen — Roman Jorritovich Faassen — does travel abroad.
On November 9, 2022, he traveled to Dubai.
His mother could not go with him, so he was accompanied by this man — Dmitry Ignatov:
Here is another photo of him. Just imagine how lucky the man was — he got into Vladimir Putin’s annual call-in show in 2015. A unique chance to ask the president a tough question!
But of course, Dmitry Ignatov was not really a guest at the call-in show — he was working. Ignatov is an officer of the FSO (Russia’s Federal Protective Service), who has guarded Vladimir Putin for many years. And, on the side, takes his grandson to Dubai.
Very soon, presidential candidate Vladimir Putin will publish his election disclosure — he’ll turn out his pockets and tell us about his income and property. He’ll show what he has accumulated through 25 years of backbreaking labor as president. Of course, we won’t see the Gelendzhik palace or the fleet of six yachts; instead we’ll see a Skif trailer, a Niva car, a garage, and a 77-square-meter apartment.
And we also won’t see any explanation of how it happened that Vladimir Putin has formally become the poorest person in his own circle. Everyone around him became billionaires: his wife, his ex-wife’s new husband, both daughters, nephews, friends, friends’ children, judo sparring partners, neighbors from his dacha cooperative, former KGB colleagues — everyone got rich. And he alone, poor soul, has had the same Skif trailer and pathetic garage in his disclosure for 25 years.
And we also won’t hear Putin explain why, for a man who so often frightens everyone with the terrible West and wages war against it, his entire family ended up tied to that same West. Maria Vorontsova was living there until quite recently, when she was married to Dutch citizen Jorrit Faassen. In the Netherlands, they owned a 700-square-meter penthouse worth 300 million rubles.
His other daughter has a villa in Biarritz, France:
And as soon as his ex-wife got divorced, she rushed around like mad buying up real estate all over the world with money from who knows where. Now we find her in Spain, then in Switzerland, then in France next door to her daughter.
You can just picture the touching scene: 11-year-old Dutch citizen Roman Jorritovich Faassen sitting on the lap of his very conservative grandfather, listening to stories about godless Europe, which dreams of nothing but tearing Russia apart. A trauma for life!
Today we talked about only one of Vladimir Putin’s daughters. Just what we found on the surface adds up to more than 2 billion rubles. Maria Vorontsova is not an outstanding entrepreneur; she has done nothing particularly remarkable in her life. She is simply a doctor who was lucky enough to be born into the family of a monstrously corrupt president. Had she been born into any other family, somewhere in the Russian provinces, she would be earning her 30,000 rubles and standing in a store unable to believe that a dozen eggs costs 150 rubles. That’s how it works: either the president’s relatives and friends are all billionaires, or doctors earn decent salaries. Those two things cannot coexist.
Most likely, you’re sitting there right now thinking, “I’m so sick of all this,” “When will they finally have stolen enough,” or “When is he finally going to die already.” We all ask ourselves these questions from time to time. Unfortunately, there is only one answer: without our participation, nothing will change.
Putin is now running for another term, there are about two months left until the election, and you could hardly imagine a better moment to start doing something.
You can send this video or any of our other investigations to people you know, or take part in the “Russia Without Putin” campaign and choose whatever activity feels comfortable for you: from calling strangers to posting flyers and forwarding campaign messages on WhatsApp urging people not to vote for Putin. You can also register with our anonymous underground штабs. In short, there is plenty to do while there is still time.
So let’s just do something, instead of waiting for a miracle to fall into our laps.
No to war.
Freedom for Alexei Navalny.