On Thursday June 6, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his wife Lyudmila Putina announced on state television that are getting a divorce after nearly thirty years of marriage. Putin described the divorce as “our joint decision” and explaining that the
On Thursday June 6, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his wife Lyudmila Putina announced on state television that are getting a divorce after nearly thirty years of marriage. Putin described the divorce as “our joint decision” and explaining that the couple had lived separate lives for some time. The couple were married in 1983 and have two adult daughters, Mariya and Ekaterina.”
The Putin divorce is in keeping with current Russian social trends. Russia has the 15th highest female divorce rate and 28th highest male divorce rate in the world and the Russian Orthodox Church permits divorce under certain circumstances. The Russian people, however, are not accustomed to the public breakdown of the marriages of their leaders.
President Putin will be the first Russian leader to divorce while in office since Czar Peter the Great sent his first wife, Evdokia Lopukhina to a convent in 1698. Like the Putins, Peter and Evdokia had lived separate lives for a long time before the official end of their marriage. Unlike this week’s Russian divorce announcement however, Peter the Great’s divorce was not a mutual decision and transformed his first wife from an admirer