Kathrine Frich
Instead of taking his father’s famous last name, the boy was given his mother’s surname.
When a new baby arrives, most proud grandparents cannot wait to share the happy news.
Photos get passed around at work, and family trees grow in the open.
For the world’s most guarded leaders, though, even a birth certificate becomes a closely kept state secret.
An eleven-month delay
Russian President Vladimir Putin has welcomed a fourth grandchild under heavy secrecy. According to the investigative outlet Agency, the president’s younger official daughter, Katerina Tikhonova, gave birth to a baby boy at the Kremlin Hospital in Moscow on August 15, 2025.
Official records reviewed by Agency show that the child is named Adrian Igorevich Tikhonov.
His father is most likely Russian ballet choreographer Igor Zelensky, who began seeing Tikhonova in 2017 while directing the Bavarian State Ballet in Munich, after her 2013 marriage to Kirill Shamalov, the son of a Putin ally.
Instead of taking his father’s famous last name, the boy was given his mother’s surname. According to Agency, clerks in Moscow’s Chertanovo district did not issue his birth certificate until July 10, 2026, nearly 11 months after he was born.
Russian rules normally require parents to register a baby within a single month, and Agency reported that the long wait likely came from efforts to hide the birth or sort out the sensitive surname.
A growing family tree
Tikhonova, who runs the Innopraktyka foundation, avoided in-person public events after 2021 and only spoke via video link until she stepped onstage at the Razgon festival in September 2026, according to Agency.
She and Zelensky also share an older daughter named Elza, who was born in December 2017.
According to the investigative site Projekt, Elza originally received the Zelensky surname at birth before getting a passport under her mother’s last name and flying abroad with bodyguards, tutors, and nannies.
Two months before Adrian arrived in June 2025, Agency noted, Putin let slip a rare detail about a granddaughter whose “nanny is from Beijing.”
Hiding behind false names
Putin’s older daughter, Maria Vorontsova, has two sons of her own. According to Agency, she welcomed Roman Faassen with Dutch businessman Jorrit Faassen in August 2012, followed by Andriy Nagorny with Novatek executive Yevgeny Nagorny in April 2017.
Using different last names is standard practice across the Kremlin leader’s wider family.
According to Agency, his two sons with Alina Kabaeva, Ivan, born in Switzerland in 2015, and Vladimir, born in 2019, use the surname Spiridonov, a nod to Putin’s grandfather Spiridon, while his daughter Luiza with Svetlana Krivonogikh has used the names Rozova and Rudnova.
