Vladimir Putin And Wife Lyudmila Divorce.

MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir
Putin was seen with his wife, Lyudmila,
Thursday night for the first time in a year,
at a production of the ballet “La
Esmeralda,” and took advantage of the
occasion to tell his nation that they are
getting divorced.
During the first intermission, at the
Kremlin State Palace, the couple was
interviewed by the Russia 24 news
channel. They exchanged a few
pleasantries about the ballet, and then the
reporter mentioned that they are rarely
seen together.
“There are so many rumors that you’re
divorced,” the reporter said. “Is this
correct?”
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“This is correct,” Putin said. Looking at
Lyudmila, who was wearing a black outfit
with white accents, he said, “All my work is
related to publicity. But there are people
who are absolutely incompatible with this,
for instance, Lyudmila Alexandrovna” —
using a formal style of address that
includes her patronymic. It’s a way of
talking that long-married couples
occasionally resort to — sometimes with
fondness. It would be like President
Obama referring to his wife as “Mrs.
Obama.”
“We hardly see each other, and we each
have our own lives,” Lyudmila Putin said.
“I don’t like publicity, and flying wears me
down. We will remain very close people
forever, and I am grateful to Vladimir
Vladimirovich” — again, the polite form of
address — “that he still supports me.”
Both said the divorce was a joint decision.
They called their divorce civilized but
didn’t say whether it had been legally
formalized.
The last time they were seen in public
together was in May 2012, at his
inauguration, when he was shown
accepting her congratulations as if they
had been apart for a long time. Lyudmila
Putin has been reported to be living in
Sardinia, among other places, and to be
spending time in Paris.
“She was a woman who loved and was not
loved,” Nataliya Gevorkyan, who wrote a
biography of Putin in 2000, said in a
recent interview in Paris.
Lyudmila Putin was an Aeroflot flight
attendant from Kaliningrad when the
couple met. Vladimir Putin was a young
KGB agent. He had already left one
fiancée at the altar — also named
Lyudmila. They married in 1983.
She followed him to Dresden, in East
Germany at the time, then back to St.
Petersburg and on to Moscow when he
took a job in the Kremlin. Along the way,
they had two daughters, now grown.
As president, Putin has made a fetish of
appearing to work inhuman hours, often
interspersed with bouts of intense
physical activity.
The Putins had entered the theater
Thursday to brief and uncomfortable
applause, with some in the audience
standing awkwardly as if startled by their
appearance. Their being together rated a
news item by the RIA Novosti news
agency. After the interview, conducted
while they stood side by side in a room off
the auditorium, the Putins left the
theater. They missed the last two acts of
the melodramatic ballet based on “The
Hunchback of Notre Dame,” the Victor
Hugo novel.