The youngest daughter of Russian president-elect Vladimir Putin will marry a South Korean man, local media reported Friday. He is the son of a retired admiral who had served as a military attache at the Korean Embassy in Moscow.

Putin’s daughter, Yekaterina Vladmirovna Putina, 25, will marry Yoon Joon-won, 27, shortly after her father’s presidential inauguration on May 7, reports said.

“Yoon will head to Russia on Friday under the protection of Russian bodyguards as the wedding preparations are being carried out again,” a vernacular daily said.

This is not the first time that speculations about a marriage involving the two have surfaced. Back in 2010, news about Putin’s alleged future son-in-law heated up the local media and Putin‘s office formally dismissed the rumor.

Yoon had complained that he was totally cut off from Putin shortly after the news was released, and refused to talk about his relationship with Putin’s daughter.

The president’s daughter and Yoon are said to have first met at an international school ball in Moscow in 1999. Yoon was in Russia for eight years before moving to the U.S. where he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an international politics major. After graduation he worked for Samsung Electronics in Moscow.

Yekaterina Putina was born in 1986 in Dresden, Germany, and attended St. Petersburg State University from where she holds a degree in Japanese history. 


By Chung Joo-won

(joowonc@heraldcorp.com)