Vladimir Putin’s family has welcomed a new member with a name that may raise a few eyebrows.
Leysan Kabaeva, the younger sister of the Russian dictator’s rumored longtime girlfriend Alina Kabaeva, gave birth to a daughter whom she named Melania, according to leaked civil registry records obtained by independent Russian investigative news outlet Agentstvo.
The girl was born in May 2025 in the same Moscow hospital where Kabaeva, 43, gave birth to a son in 2019—reportedly her second child with Putin, 74, according to Agentstvo.
The name choice is particularly striking given First Lady Melania Trump’s newfound role mediating humanitarian efforts between Russia and Ukraine, with Putin routinely gushing over her.
Putin’s rumored longtime lover Alina Kabaeva, 43, is only a few years older than both of his daughters. She reportedly has four children with the dictator, including two sons called Ivan and Vladimir.
Last month, the warmongering despot fawned over Melania’s “humanitarian efforts” in Ukraine during his face-to-face meeting with President Donald Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff in St. Petersburg.
Putin asked Witkoff to pass along his “gratitude” to Melania for her efforts to reunite Ukrainian children with their families and for leading mediations to “resolve” the humanitarian crisis in the Russian-occupied Ukrainian city of Oleshky, Russian presidential aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters, according to TASS, the state-owned Russian news agency.
Putin’s praise for Melania landed days after the first lady’s top aide Marc Beckman bragged about her “direct line” to the dictator.
The 74-year-old dictator’s flattery of Melania, 56, comes as Trump, 80, hands Moscow a series of wins while U.S.-Ukraine relations continue to deteriorate.
Sputnik/Mikhail Klimentyev/Kremlin via REUTERS
Shortly after Putin’s gushing session over Melania, the White House announced that the first lady had single-handedly brokered a local ceasefire in the Russian-occupied city of Oleshky, though she was accused of stealing credit from Pope Leo.
Her efforts in Oleshky have since been slammed by Ukrainian human rights figures who say she has become a propaganda tool for Putin, who continued to send deadly drone strikes into Ukraine while using the local ceasefire to portray himself as a humanitarian.
“Melania Trump brokered a ceasefire without a single independent monitor in the room, and Russia used that gap to stage exactly the picture it wanted the world to see,” Lyudmyla Yankina from Ukrainian human rights group Civil Fortis told the Daily Beast.
“She never mentioned the roughly 2,000 civilians Russia has held in Oleshky for years as a human shield or the residents abducted into filtration camps who are still unaccounted for. She’s lending her credibility to the very propaganda operation Russia built this ‘humanitarian mission’ to produce.”
Meanwhile, the leaked civil registry records revealed that Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova, 40, gave birth to a son, Adrian, last August.
But his arrival came with an inconvenient catch: by convention, his grandson’s last name would be none other than “Zelensky.”
Katerina Tikhonova, one of Putin’s acknowledged daughters, oversees key Russian AI projects and is linked to drone production, an industry that has become a crucial component of her father’s war on Ukraine.
EVGENIA NOVOZHENINA/REUTERS
Adrian’s father is ballet dancer Igor Zelensky, 57, who is unrelated to Volodymyr Zelensky, the democratically elected Ukrainian president Putin has been unsuccessfully trying to topple since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
It appears to be an association Putin was unwilling to entertain: his grandson is registered as Adrian Tikhonov, using the masculine form of his mother Katerina’s surname rather than Zelensky.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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