Maria Vorontsova

Maria Vorontsova (, Mariya Vladimirovna Putina, Мария Владимировна Путина; born 28 April 1985), also referred to as Maria Faassen, is a Russian pediatric endocrinologist. She is the eldest child of Russian president Vladimir Putin. Early life Vorontsova was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg), the elder daughter of Vladimir Putin and Lyudmila Putina (née Shkrebneva). She attended German school at Dresden, East Germany, while her family lived there in the 1980s. After her family returned to Leningrad in the spring of 1991, she attended Peterschule, a German gymnasium in Saint Petersburg. Later, during violent gang wars involving the Tambov Gang while it was taking control of Saint Petersburg's energy trade, she and her sister Katerina were sent by their father, who feared for their safety, to Germany where their legal guardian was former Stasi Matthias Warnig, who had worked with their father in Dresden as part of a KGB cell and established the Dresdner Bank branch in Saint Petersburg. She played the violin for a Russian consulate general of Hamburg–sponsored diplomatic breakfast in 1995. Later, after her family moved to Moscow, she attended the German School Moscow, a school closely associated with the German Embassy in Moscow for children of diplomats. She graduated after 11 years of school. Three years later, she began her university studies, enrolling together with Katerina as first year students. Studies Vorontsova studied biology at Saint Petersburg State University and is a graduate of medicine at Moscow State University in 2011. With Ivan Ivanovich Dedov as her advisor, she was a PhD candidate at the Endocrinology Research Centre in Moscow, headed by Dedov and which runs the charity project Alfa-Endo, for children with endocrine diseases. Alfa-Endo is funded by Petr Aven and Mikhail Fridman's Alfa-Bank of the Alfa Group.