Some 13 years ago, the famously protective personal life of Russia’s then-prime minister, Vladimir Putin, was rattled by a report that his youngest daughter intended to marry the son of a retired South Korean naval admiral.
The report, which appeared in a major South Korean newspaper cited the father of Yoon Joon-won as the source for the news.
It was met with denials by Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. The father, who served as a military attaché at Seoul’s embassy in Moscow, later denied the reports himself. Subsequent media reports about a planned wedding were denied by Yoon and the Kremlin as well.
In 2013, Tikhonova married Kirill Shamalov – the son of one of Putin’s closest friends – who proceeded to leverage his proximity to power into a billion-dollar fortune before the couple ultimately separated.
Meanwhile, Yoon, the alleged Korean beau, fell out of view.
Yoon is not the only associate of Putin’s daughters to land positions within the Gazprom empire.
But a new investigation by Systema, RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit, found that Yoon has done well for himself – in Russia – landing executive positions under Gazprombank, the lending arm of state energy giant Gazprom and a conduit for wages paid to Russian soldiers deployed in the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.
Yoon, 38, joined Gazprombank as a “board consultant” in 2013, the same year Putin’s daughter married Shamalov, and was appointed vice president two years later, open-source records reviewed by Systema reveal.
In 2019, Yoon joined the board of United Heavy Machinery (OMZ), a Gazprombank-owned industrial manufacturer, while maintaining his position as a vice president with the bank, Russia’s third largest by assets, the records show.
Yoon is not the only associate of Putin’s daughters to land positions within the Gazprom empire. The Russian president’s older daughter, Maria Vorontsova, was previously in a relationship with a Dutchman named Jorrit Faassen, who worked for both Gazprom and a Gazprombank unit, previous media investigations revealed.
Vorontsova and Faassen, who had his land plot near Amsterdam seized by Dutch prosecutors earlier this year, have since split up, according to an investigation by Meduza and Current Time, the Russian-language network run by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA.
Both Kirill Shamalov, Putin’s former son-in-law, and his older brother also worked at Gazprombank.
One former Gazprombank vice president, Igor Volobuyev, told Systema that there were rumors at the bank that Yoon was the son-in-law of “someone in the Kremlin.”
Several former colleagues of Yoon’s at Gazprombank said they could not recall exactly what he did at the company. Others remembered him as a good worker.
“An entirely solid and competent employee. I’ll leave it at that,” one of Yoon’s former bosses at the company told Systema.
A former colleague of Yoon's at OMZ told Systema that the Korean alleged ex-fiancé of Putin’s daughter Yekaterina took his job seriously.
"He was at all the meetings, he behaved very actively," the colleague said on condition of anonymity.
While public records about Yoon’s employment with Gazprombank are sparse, he has appeared in photographs from a corporate basketball tournament and in a corporate promotional video about a Russian-Korean cultural event.
Fathers And Daughters
The subject of Putin’s personal life has been a focus of speculation and investigation for years, going back to his early political days in the office of the mayor of St. Petersburg in the 1990s, prior to his meteoric rise to the presidency in 1999.
Putin and his now ex-wife, Lyudmila, rarely appeared in public together. The Kremlin -- along with his top advisers and bodyguard service -- strenuously sought to keep his daughters out of the public eye, even refusing to discuss their names publicly.
In sanctions announced in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the U.S. Treasury Department identified them specifically as Katerina Vladimirovna Tikhonova and Maria Vladimirovna Vorontsova.
After he and Lyudmila announced their separation in 2013, Putin’s bachelor activities drew attention – with focus falling on former Olympic rhythmic gymnast Alina Kabayeva, with whom he is rumored to be romantically linked and, according to multiple media reports, with whom he has children. Putin has never publicly acknowledged a relationship with Kabayeva, whom the U.S. Treasury Department describes as having “a close relationship” to the Russian president.
Vorontsova, a pediatric endocrinologist, was believed to have married her Dutch husband Faassen in 2008. The couple later separated sometime before 2022. In a Dutch real estate record dated 2019 and uncovered by Current Time, Faassen declared that he was “unmarried.” Vorontsova later married Yevgeny Nagorny, an executive at a Russian natural gas company, and gave birth to their son in 2017.
Tikhonova, meanwhile, met Yoon in Moscow in the late 1990s, according to the reports that first appeared in the Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo in October 2010.
On February 20, 2011, a few months after the denials of the purportedly planned wedding, Tikhonova, Yoon, and two other friends flew together on a flight on the Russian airline S7, departing from Moscow, according to Systema’s review of records from a flight database obtained by the Ukrainian hacker group Kib0rg. The database, which includes partial information, does not indicate their final destination. Three days later, Tikhonova returned to Moscow from Munich.
In April 2012, Korean media reported again on a planned wedding involving Tikhonova and Yoon, timed around the inauguration of Putin for his third term as president that May, after a four-year stint as prime minister. These claims were again denied by both Yoon and Peskov.
Two years later, British violinist Lettice Rowbotham said that she and other musicians performed at the wedding of “Putin’s youngest daughter,” allegedly held at a posh hotel in Marrakech, Morocco, in 2010. Rowbotham did not respond to an inquiry from Systema in time for publication.
Following her separation from Shamalov, Tikhonova was linked romantically to Russian ballet dancer and director Igor Zelensky, with whom she has a daughter born in 2017.
Following the birth, Putin established a special foundation as part of an initiative to build cultural centers in Russia. Zelensky was appointed to the foundation’s board, along with the heads of the Bolshoi Theater and the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the Mariinsky Theater and Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg.
Yoon, meanwhile, left the board of OMZ in 2021 but continued to work for Gazprombank in 2022, Systema reporters found. Gazprombank did not respond to a request for comment.
Records from the flight database obtained by Systema indicate Yoon, who also did not respond to a request for comment, was still employed by Gazprombank as recently as 2023.
Earlier this year, Yoon flew from Moscow to Kazakhstan’s financial capital, Almaty, and back. The return ticket was purchased by Gazprombank, which is confirmed by a special notation in the ticket description, according to an analysis of the flight records by Systema.
