Claiming to be Putin's mother, the unexpected happens to the elderly woman

A woman who claimed for years to be Vladimir Putin's real mother has died at the age of 97.

Vera Putina, who died in poverty in the village of Meteki in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, insisted for years that the Russian president was her son, whom she was forced to send to his grandparents at the behest of her stepfather.

The woman first spoke out in 1999, but Putin wrote in his autobiography that he was born and raised in St. Petersburg and was the only surviving son of a worker named Maria and Vladimir Putin, a factory worker and former soldier. who served in Joseph Stalin's secret police during World War II.

His parents, Putin said, died of cancer in the late 1990s.

Vera Nikolaevna Putina was born on September 6, 1926 in the Ochiorsk region of Russia. She claimed that while studying Agricultural Engineering at the University, she fell in love with engineer Platon Privalov, became pregnant and later discovered that her boyfriend was married and intended to kidnap her baby because his wife was barren.

Vera Putina claimed that she gave birth to her son, nicknamed "Vova", on October 7, 1950, exactly two years before Putin's official date of birth, and that she raised him in the impoverished village of Meteki.

One teacher, Sura Gabinashvili, claimed in a 2008 interview with Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper that she taught Putin Russian lessons.

"He liked Russian myths and the Russian language was his favorite subject. He also liked fishing."

When Vera married the Georgian soldier Giorgi Osepakhvili, with whom she had more children, he asked her to give up her firstborn, and she sent the child at the age of nine to live with her parents in Russia. However, a year later, the child's grandfather took him to an orphanage.

Vera later speculated that Putin's "parents" in St. Petersburg, who were both in their 40s when he was born and whose two oldest sons had died in childhood, had adopted her son.

Vera discovered that her son had joined the KGB, but thought she would never see him again. However, in 1999, watching the news on TV about the new prime minister of Russia, she immediately recognized Vladimir Putin as her son because he "walked like a duck".

Suspicions that the Kremlin tried to "bury" the story of Vera Putina appeared to be strengthened after the mysterious deaths of two journalists who planned to interview her. The first, a Kremlin critic named Artyom Borovi, who was preparing a documentary about Putin's childhood at the time, was killed on March 9, 2000. The second, Italian Antonio Russo, was killed later that year while covering the war Russia's second in Chechnya.

Russian-American historian Yuri Felstinsky has argued that Vera Putin's claims may explain Putin's loyalty to the KGB and FSB.

Vera Putina said her son never forgave her for sending him to his grandparents in Ochior, Russia. Sources in Georgia confirmed to British newspaper The Sun that the woman died of old age in Tbilisi and was buried in her village of Meteki last Tuesday.