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Latest E.U. Sanctions Get Personal With Putin’s Daughters and Confidants

A number of high-profile names were added Friday to the European Union’s list of sanctioned individuals as part of the bloc’s fifth package of measures against Russia, none more personal for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia than his own daughters.

The daughters, Katerina Tikhonova and Maria Putina, who has been living under an assumed name, Maria Vorontsova, were among the dozens of new individuals targeted with asset freezes and travel bans by the European Union.

Mr. Putin has traditionally been extremely secretive about his daughters, barely mentioning their names and offering no details about their lives in public. At least one of the women has in the past lived in the Netherlands.

The new E.U. sanctions included prominent figures in Mr. Putin’s close environment, including some who have been linked to him for decades.

Among them is Herman Gref, one of the most trusted technocrats in Mr. Putin’s economic policy team. He was the architect of Mr. Putin’s economic reforms during his first tenure as president, helping to set the stage for an economic boom in Russia that abruptly ended with the 2008 global recession.

For the past 15 years, Mr. Gref, who met Mr. Putin in the 1990s in St. Petersburg, has been the chief executive of Sberbank, Russia’s biggest financial institution. Sberbank has not been sanctioned by the European Union, in contrast to several other major banks.

Another prominent name on the new E.U. list is Boris Rotenberg, who can trace his relationship with Mr. Putin to much earlier times.

In the 1960s, he practiced judo in the same school with the future president. Following Mr. Putin’s accession to the Kremlin, Mr. Rotenberg, together with his brother Arkady, cobbled together a pipeline construction empire, winning lucrative contracts from Gazprom, Russia’s natural gas giant.

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