The Anti-Corruption Foundation has published an investigation into Maria Kitaeva, former adviser to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. Investigators gained access to “a complete archive of [Kitaeva’s] mail spanning 17 years” and learned about her trips to Europe and other expenses.
39-year-old Kitaeva began working in 2007 on state television, the Zvezda channel of the Ministry of Defense and the All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company. After Shoigu was appointed governor of the Moscow Region in 2012, Kitaeva became his adviser «on information issues», and then moved to the Ministry of Defense for a similar position with the rank of major general. -publish-context-cite__image» alt=»1″ />Family business under Shoigu. How Putin's fellow traveler from the Lada Kalina became a major general, and her brother built housing on the site of a military factory
Mediazona and the Scanner Project found in 2020 that Kitaeva declared the same number of children and their property as Shoigu's deputy, Colonel General Yuri Sadovenko. They were not married. The construction company of Kitaeva's brother Denis built an elite residential complex Cloud Nine in Moscow on the site of the cartographic factory of the Ministry of Defense on Bolshaya Polyanka.
Because of the war, Kitaeva was sanctioned by Canada and Ukraine last year. The United States, the EU and the United Kingdom also imposed sanctions against Sadovenko. In the spring of 2023, Kitaeva left the Ministry of Defense and became an adviser to the new director of the Tretyakov Gallery.
FBK learned from leaked correspondence that Kitaeva “almost every summer” flew with her children on vacation to Tuscany, where she rented a villa, and regularly visited other countries. At the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Kitaeva was in London, and then flew several times to Italy and Hungary — the last time in July 2023.
The value of the real estate of the Kitaeva family, whose mother worked in the Moscow City Hall in the office of the former deputy mayor, developer Vladimir Resin, was estimated at two billion rubles. This is a house on Rublyovka with an area of 1,100 square meters and apartments on the Arbat, in Khamovniki and the Tverskoy district.
The investigators also found a letter from Kitaeva that in the summer of 2016, when she had a premature birth while on vacation in Tuscany, a certain “Zhenya Prigozhin” paid for her a private plane with doctors to Moscow. Probably, we are talking about the founder of Wagner PMC Evgeny Prigogine.