At the break of dawn in the summer of 2021, Russian authorities launched a surprising raid on a prominent opposition journalist.

Roman Badanin was jolted awake at 6 a.m. on June 29 by the relentless doorbell of his apartment in Moscow’s Chertanovo district.

Upon opening the door, he was met by a group of six to eight plainclothes officers from the FSB, Russia’s state security agency, with one of them brandishing a search warrant.

For the next six hours, these officers meticulously searched his two-bedroom apartment, while uniformed police examined his and his wife’s vehicles outside. Afterward, they took him to the closest police station for a grueling four-hour interrogation.

Such a forceful approach might lead one to assume Badanin was implicated in some massive financial fraud or accused of orchestrating a military uprising.

In fact, he had merely had the temerity to run a short and anodyne interview with a young woman he believed to be an illegitimate daughter of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin.

‘It’s quite simple,’ Badanin, 48, told the Daily Mail this week. ‘Putin’s private life is one of the most taboo topics. One of the sayings among Russian journalists is: “Don’t touch his family”.’

Now living in exile in California with his wife and young daughter, Badanin, along with his long-time collaborator Mikhail Rubin, 37, has just published a book entitled The Tsar Himself, How Vladimir Putin Deceived Us All, which contains incendiary claims about the president’s love life.

While Putin presents himself to his public as a champion of traditional family values, since his earliest days in politics he has enjoyed the company of strippers, prostitutes and other young women drawn to him by the aphrodisiac of power.

The ‘secret First Lady’: Putin’s lover Alina Kabaeva (pictured posing in Maxim magazine in January 2004)

Pictured: Alisa Kharcheva, a 17-year-old female student posed in a camisole for a birthday calendar for Putin, alongside the caption: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, you are the best!’

Putin’s wife Lyudmila hated her husband’s 16 to 17-hour days, describing him to one friend as a ‘vampire’

Putin cut his teeth in the KGB, the Soviet Union’s feared security agency but, following the collapse of the communist regime in 1991, he went into politics and, within three years, was deputy mayor of St Petersburg.

By then he had been married to Lyudmila, a former Aeroflot stewardess, for more than a decade and they had two daughters.

That didn’t stop the diminutive (5ft 7in) but dynamic Putin from holding regular ‘meetings’ in a city centre striptease club called Luna, which had rooms on the second floor for private ‘encounters’ with its nubile performers.

Luna, which operated under the protection of a criminal gang with links to Putin’s bodyguard of the time, Roman Tsepov, is said to have ‘felt like home’ to Putin.

But his first significant extramarital affair was not with a stripper but a shop cleaner called Svetlana Krivonogikh, who – it has to be said – was something of a beauty.

The pair are said to have got together in 1999, when Putin was prime minister but destined for the presidency, and had a daughter four years later. It was that child, Elizaveta – who today goes by the name Luiza Rozova – who gave the fateful interview to Badanin’s investigative news outlet Proekt in 2020.

Andrey Zakharov, the reporter who conducted the interview, later wrote that she ‘bears a phenomenal resemblance to the President of Russia’.

And we don’t have to take his word for it. Proekt took the precaution of sending photos of Rozova to Professor Hassan Ugail, director of the Centre for Visual Computing at Bradford University, and his analysis found a 70.44 per cent similarity between Putin and the then teenager.

When asked if she was Putin’s daughter, Rozova ignored the question and her father is not named on her birth certificate but, in what would appear to have been a careless lapse by the Kremlin, her patronymic – a moniker based on the father’s name – is listed as Vladimirovna.

What is undeniable is that her birth coincided with a dramatic change in her mother’s fortunes.

Lookalikes: Putin aged 14 in class photo (left) and alleged third daughter Luiza Rozova (right)

In 2003, Krivonogikh, 50, bought a £2.9million fourth-floor apartment in Monte Carlo, Monaco’s most sought-after district, through an offshore company.

We know this because the transaction was disclosed in 2021 in the leaked Pandora Papers, which also revealed that she had accumulated a fortune of more than £78million, including a flat in a prestigious compound in her home city of St Petersburg, properties in Moscow and a yacht.

But it wasn’t long before Putin’s wandering eye had fallen on a fresh target.

Alina Kabaeva, then 21, became a national hero in 2004 when she capped a glittering career in rhythmic gymnastics by winning gold at the Athens Olympics.

Known as ‘Russia’s most flexible woman’ thanks to her signature move of a back split pivot that was named the ‘Kabaeva’ in her honour, she celebrated her win by posing nude for Maxim magazine, her modesty protected by a strategically placed fur. 

The person who played Cupid with the president was described as Kabaeva’s ‘second mother’, her coach Irina Viner, wife of the oligarch Alisher Usmanov. She introduced her protege, by now dubbed ‘Russia’s sexiest celebrity’, to the bed-hopping president shortly after her Olympic win and, a year later, Putin himself presented her with the ‘For Merit to the Fatherland’ order at the Kremlin. 

Their affair is believed to have begun in 2006 and perhaps the most conclusive proof that she really was Putin’s lover came a year later when her former boyfriend, the singer Murat Nasyrov, died after ‘falling’ from a fifth floor balcony of a Moscow apartment.

But Putin’s obsession with keeping his private life under wraps was most vividly illustrated in 2008, when a racy tabloid called the Moskovsky Korrespondent (Moscow Correspondent) reported that he and Kabaeva were to get married in a summer wedding in St Petersburg. It didn’t help that the story made international headlines when Putin was asked about it during a news conference in Italy with the country’s then prime minister

Silvio Berlusconi. ‘I am, of course, aware of the cliché that politicians live in glass houses, but even in these cases, there must be some limits,’ said Putin. ‘I always disliked people who go around with their erotic fantasies, sticking their snot-ridden noses into another person’s life.’ Berlusconi then mimed shooting the reporter who asked the question with an imaginary machine gun.

Back in Moscow, the man in Putin’s firing line turned out to be the Korrespondent’s editor Grigory Nekhoroshev. The paper’s offices were reportedly raided by the FSB, who questioned all the journalists involved in producing the article and are said to have detained Nekhoroshev. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his now-ex wife Lyudmila seen together in 2011

Somewhat improbably, he later said the supposed FSB officers were in fact, ‘a group of friends who had come to pick me up from the office’. Whatever the truth of the matter, Nekhoroshev was forced to resign and, under pressure from the Kremlin, the paper was closed down by its proprietor.

She may not have got her day at the altar but Kabaeva is now said to have two sons with Putin: Ivan, 10, and Vladimir, six, and – like Svetlana, the cleaner who became unfeasibly wealthy after taking up with virile Vlad – she reaped the rewards of her relationship with someone who is often described as the richest man in the world.

In 2014, by now known as ‘Russia’s secret First Lady’, Kabaeva was made head of the National Media Group on a reported salary of £7.7million and is a major shareholder in Bank Rossiya, one of the country’s largest private banks.

Later that same year both Putin and Kabaeva were seen wearing wedding rings at the Sochi Winter Olympics, where Kabaeva was chosen to be the torch-bearer at the opening ceremony.

At this point, Putin had finally separated from his long-suffering wife Lyudmila. According to Badanin and Rubin, the writing had been on the wall since the summer of 2004, when the Putins had a chance encounter with an old acquaintance while on an official visit to Mexico.

Igor Shadkhan, a film director who had made documentaries about Putin, met the couple in their hotel room and, as they chatted, he suggested – rather bravely – that the president was in danger of transforming himself into an autocrat who would take Russia back into its Soviet past.

This provoked an extraordinary reaction from Lyudmila, who – say the authors – became ‘hysterical’ and, on the verge of tears, tried to convince her domineering husband that he had been wrong to seek a second term that year. ‘Putin was stunned, as was Shadkhan,’ they reveal.

‘The film-maker left the hotel, realising he had witnessed a scene he should not have seen. It was clear Lyudmila’s fate would be dire. She had publicly expressed a family disagreement on a principle deeply personal to Putin – his absolute control over Russia.’

However, the couple’s relationship limped on for another nine years before they announced their separation a few weeks before their 30th wedding anniversary.

In many ways it was a surprise that it lasted that long. Apart from Putin’s affairs, Lyudmila hated his 16 to 17-hour days, describing him to one friend as a ‘vampire’, while he suggested that anyone who could put up with her for as little as three weeks was heroic and deserved a monument.

Vladimir and Lyudmila went on to get divorced in 2014. Not that this meant Kabaeva could rely on her newly liberated boyfriend to stay faithful.

As early as 2010, Putin was alleged to be playing away with the star of an erotic calendar published for his 58th birthday.

She was a 17-year-old female student called Alisa Kharcheva, who posed in a camisole that showed off her embonpoint to its best advantage, alongside the caption: ‘Vladimir Vladimirovich, you are the best!’.

A copy of the calendar, along with the contact details of all the young women featured, is believed to have found its way to the Kremlin and the word is that the pneumatic brunette Miss April visited Putin at his residence twice a month for a year.

What can’t be denied is that her fortunes suddenly took a turn for the better. In 2011, Alisa enrolled at one of Russia’s top universities, the Moscow Institute of International Relations. A year later, to celebrate Putin’s 60th birthday, Alisa posted a picture of herself in a red dress, with a very plunging neckline, posing with a kitten and a framed portrait of the president, accompanied by the saucy caption: ‘Pussy for Putin’.

She added: ‘I think he [Putin] is a fantastic man, a strong leader and an ideal head of the country.’

Her flattery paid off. A few years later, it emerged that Alisa was living the high life, with an apartment inside a gated complex in one of Moscow’s best districts.

As Badanin and Rubin observe in their new book, Putin and his inner circle see marriage as ‘a completely non-obligatory institution, in which cheating and polygamy are the norm, and every woman is dependent on the man [for] her successes in her career and prosperity’.

As the lovers come and go, Kabaeva, 42, as the mother of two young children, remains the nearest thing the 73-year-old self-styled tsar has to a tsarina.

She hit the headlines in March 2022, shortly after Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, when she was reported to be living in Switzerland in a ‘very secure and private’ chalet near Lugano. Kabaeva is believed to have since returned to Russia. But the exact nature of Putin’s harem will always be shrouded in a degree of secrecy – for Roman Badanin’s experience remains a salutary tale.

For he was not the only member of Proekt’s staff to receive a knock on the door at the crack of dawn back in 2021. The homes of his deputy and co-author Rubin and one of the site’s correspondents were raided too.

But things came to ahead when Badanin took a pre-arranged holiday in Morocco shortly after his encounter with the FSB.

After spending some days travelling in the Sahara desert without any internet access, he switched on his various electronic devices to discover a hundred messages from friends: he had been declared an ‘undesirable’.

‘My wife and decided I couldn’t go back to Russia because I would be arrested and put in prison,’ he says, speaking over the encrypted messaging app Signal that he uses to this day to avoid surveillance by the FSB. ‘Anyone who collaborates with an “undesirable” person can go to prison too.

‘My wife and I went back to Russia to collect our belongings and over the next one and a half months we extracted around ten of our people.’

All in all, quite a fuss over an interview with a young woman the Kremlin denies is in any way linked to Putin. But a powerful warning to any other journalists tempted to stick their ‘snotty noses’ into Putin’s private life.

Dominic Midgley is the author of Abramovich, The Billionaire From Nowhere, the biography of the former owner of Chelsea FC