Father denies son’s impending marriage to Putin’s daughter

Retired admiral Yoon Jong-gu on Friday denied local media reports that his son, Yoon Joon-won, was likely to marry his longtime sweetheart Yekaterina Vladmirovna Putina, the youngest daughter of the Russian president-elect Vladimir Putin, soon.

Local media reported earlier that Yoon Joon-won, 27, and Putina, 25, were likely to wed shortly after Putin’s presidential inauguration on May 7.

However, in an interview with a local paper, Yoon Jong-gu, who once served as a military attach at the Korean Embassy in Moscow, denied the rumor. He was quoted as saying that he had not raised his son to marry without the parents’ knowledge. He also said that he plans to file a complaint with the Press Arbitration Commission against the media outlet which originally reported the story, according to the report.

However, he did not answer the question on whether the younger Yoon has left the country, the same report said.

“Yoon will head to Russia on Friday under the protection of Russian bodyguards as the wedding preparations are being carried out again,” a vernacular daily had said earlier Friday, quoting another media outlet.

This is not the first time that speculations about a marriage involving the two have surfaced. Back in 2010, news about Putin’s alleged future son-in-law heated up the local media and Putin’s office formally dismissed the rumor.

Yoon had complained that he was totally cut off from Putin shortly after the news was released, and refused to talk about his relationship with Putin’s daughter.

The president’s daughter and Yoon are said to have first met at an international school ball in Moscow in 1999. Yoon was in Russia for eight years before moving to the U.S. where he graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an international politics major. After graduation he worked for Samsung Electronics in Moscow.

Yekaterina Putina was born in 1986 in Dresden, Germany, and attended St. Petersburg State University from where she holds a degree in Japanese history.

By Chung Joo-won (joowonc@heraldcorp.com)