Vladimir Putin diverted dozens of Russian intelligence officers to monitor his daughter whenever she went on romantic trips to the West to meet her new lover.
Katerina Tikhonova, 35, made repeated clandestine visits over four years to Munich and other locations - including London - mostly for assignations with Igor Zelensky, 53, then head of the Bavarian State Ballet.
Each time she was accompanied by an “army of special services officers” at vast expense to Russian taxpayers, according to a revealing investigation by Important Stories media outlet and Der Spiegel based on leaked secret services papers.
On a trip to London in March 2017, six intelligence agents loyal to her father were booked into three hotel rooms on her trip by Aleksey Skripchak, her personal officer in the presidential security detail.
“They had to huddle in cramped London hotels in pairs,” said a report.
Her movements in Britain are not recorded.
On another incognito jaunt by Putin’s favourite daughter - this time to Hotel Continental Relax & Spa in Halmstad, Sweden - she was accompanied by no less than ten officers from intelligence agencies once part of the KGB.
Two of them were unmasked as Dmitry Dankov and Dmitry Posunenko, who had personally guarded her father.
Tikhonova was once a high-kicking ‘rock’n’roll’ dancer who married Russia ’s youngest billionaire Kirill Shamalov, 40, son of a close Putin crony.
But the marriage collapsed and Katerina started a relationship with ballet star Zelensky, no relation of the Ukrainian president.
The pair now share a daughter.
Earlier revelations show she underwent “Vampire Facelift” treatments and Botox procedures during her trips to Germany.
Putin has raged against Russians who enjoy the West, but meanwhile the leaked papers show how he was devoting vast state resources to Tikhonova’s foreign travels, sometimes using a luxury Gulfstream G650 business jet.
Her father apparently knew all about her love life since his spies were always present in adjacent bedrooms.
“These documents are of great public importance,” said Important Stories.
“Thanks to them, we not only found out how the Putin family lived abroad but also how an army of special service officers accompanied them everywhere.”
The agents were so mob-handed that they were noticed by German intelligence who started to monitor them, it was claimed.
Tikhonova was recently parachuted in to help Russia dodge the impact of Western sanctions over her father’s war in Ukraine.
She was made co-chairman of a high-powered group supervising import substitution, a move seen seen by some as the start of a political career.
She is also director-general of the National Intellectual Development Foundation in Russia.
She is Putin’s second daughter by former first lady Lyudmila, his ex-wife.
Her elder sister is Dr Maria Vorontsova, 37m a leading researcher at the National Medical Research Centre for Endocrinology of the Ministry of Health of Russia, and an expert on dwarfism.
She has a half-sister Luiza Rozova, 19, daughter of Putin’s ex-lover, cleaner-turned-multimillionaire Svetlana Krivonogikh, 45.
Krivonogikh is now part-owner of a major Russian bank, one of the country's wealthiest women with an estimated £74 million financial and property fortune.
Putin never identifies his daughters in public.
He is also believed to have multiple secret children with “lover” Alina Kabaeva, an Olympic gold medal winning gymnast.
