More than half of the passengers on flight MH17, which was possibly shot down by a Russian-supplied missile, were citizens of the Netherlands. That fact has turned attention on past reports that Maria Putin, one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s daughters, is dating a Dutch national and has a home in the country.
… there have been persistent rumours linking Maria with Dutch citizen Jorrit Faassen. Dutch media claimed that Putin visited the couple last year, something his spokesman denied.
A 2012 New York Times article on the Putin family said something similar:
Dutch and Russian news reports have connected Maria Putin to Jorrit Faassen, a Dutchman who has held high-level positions at subsidiaries of the Russian state gas company, Gazprom…The article quoted a Dutch oil executive who said he met Maria Putin at a party in Moscow.
Putin’s daughters are extremely secretive; there are very few known photos of Maria as an adult, and Slate doesn’t have the rights to run any of them, though you can see some here.
The Guardian points to a recent item in the Dutch paper De Telegraaf that identifies the area where Putin is thought to live:
Ukrainians living in Holland have also called for a peaceful protest outside Putin’s daughter’s flat, according to De Telegraaf newspaper. It published a photograph of the apartment complex where Maria is said to live alongside the article on Monday.
The apartment is in Voorschoten, which is near The Hague.
Google Maps
Read more of Slate’s coverage on Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.
