12/06/08 - You Can't Make This Up!

I'm Putin's Mom!---------------No She is Not!

According to an article in the Telegraph 82 year old Vira Putina claims to be the mother of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In Mrs Putina's account, Mr Putin's father was a Russian mechanic, Platon Privalov, who got her pregnant while married to another woman. She claims her son, nicknamed "Vova" was born on October 7, 1950, exactly two years before Mr Putin's official birth date.

In 1952, Mrs Putina married a Georgian soldier, Giorgi Osepahvili, and moved to Georgia with her son. In December 1960, under pressure from her husband to disown her child, she delivered "Vova" back to his grandparents in Russia. Mrs Putina believes that the St. Petersburg-based "parents" referred to in Mr Putin's biography adopted her son from his grandparents.

Shura Gabinashvili is a former Russian teacher of the village school in Metekhi. She claims to have given the child Russian language classes between 1958 and 1960, and says that she has received death threats about making the claims public.

She remembers "Vova" as "an extremely bright child, the brightest in the class. He loved Russian fables and Russian was his favorite subject. He also liked fishing and wrestling. He was the shortest child in the class but he always wanted to win at everything."

And from what seems like the script of a James Bond movie -

Despite having appeared in various European publications since 2000, efforts to get to the bottom of Mr Putina's story have so far been short-lived. The Russian journalist and media magnate, Artyom Borovik, was on his way to Kiev when his private plane crashed. Allegedly, he was on the point of publishing the story about Mrs Putina.

The Italian journalist, Antonio Russo, electronically transmitted footage of Mrs Putina to Italy shortly before he was shot dead near Tbilisi. Neither deaths have been proved to have any connection with Mrs Putina.

Mrs Putina states she is no longer willing to talk to journalists on the subject, but challenges Mr Putin to disprove her story. "I am ready to do a DNA test if he is."