Moskovsky Korrespondent's publication has been "suspended for financial reasons" after running a story claiming that outgoing Russian President Vladimir Putin is dumping his wife for a gorgeous gymnast 32 years his junior.
Putin denies the story completely.
He paused and answered another question, and then returned to the subject and pushed back. “What you are saying has not a single word of truth,” he said.
The question followed the publication on Thursday of an unusual article in Moskovsky Korrespondent, a Moscow newspaper owned by a former Soviet intelligence officer, which said that Mr. Putin, 56, planned to marry Alina Kabayeva, 24, an Olympic gold medalist in rhythmic gymnastics who has been voted in polls as one of Russia’s most beautiful women. Interfax reported Friday evening that publication of Moskovsky Korrespondent had been suspended “for financial reasons,” according to its parent company, National Media Company.
Mr. Putin has been married to Ludmilla Putina, 51, since July 1983 — two months before Ms. Kabayeva was born. The couple has two grown daughters, but Mr. Putin and Mrs. Putina are not often seen together in public, which has long fueled rumors that Russia’s president has had a wandering eye.
Ms. Kabayeva has been a member of Parliament since she was selected for a seat late last year by United Russia, the political party Mr. Putin controls. She has not spoken publicly since Thursday, when the article appeared and its claims were picked up and circulated by newspapers and Web sites in Russia and beyond.
Her spokeswoman threatened legal action against Moskovsky Korrespondent if it did not run a correction. ...
Whether the article’s underlying assertion — that Mr. Putin was romantically involved with Ms. Kabayeva — would stand was not clear. But even the owner of the newspaper, Aleksandr Lebedev, distanced himself from it.
Mr. Lebedev wrote a follow-up article in the paper on Friday, saying that he had been away fishing, and without phone communication, when the original article was prepared and published. Upon his return to Moscow, he said, he had concluded that the article was false.
“I do not like when journalists pull sensations out of thin air,” he wrote. “Everything that is written there falls into this category.”
He called the report “nonsense” and said it was based on a source he described as the “O.B.S. news agency.” Those initials, he said, stood for “one babushka said.”
Interfax reported that the paper’s editor, Grigory Nekhoroshev, had resigned.
But the paper’s deputy editor, Igor Dudinski, said the staff stood by the article, adding, “We had information, and we reported it.”
Interestingly, Lebedev also purchased a stake in Novaya Gazeta with former Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev in June 2006, according to the BBC.
That paper employed Russian journalist and Putin nemesis Anna Politkovskaya, slain in 2006.