Is this Putin's secret daughter? The tantalising clues

They are two teenagers just fooling around in a series of homemade social media videos. The girl is slim with long, pale, brown hair and a pretty face that is strangely familiar.

The boy is dark-haired, good-looking and wears a Mona Lisa T-shirt.

In one sequence they dance, pose and pout to Vibe by the American artist Cookiee Kawaii, the viral soundtrack to 1.6 million other teenage TikTok films.

But this version is different. It is the only one to star the alleged ‘secret daughter’ of Russian president Vladimir Putin and her friend who, intriguingly, happens to be the nephew of a Mafia-linked tycoon, lives in a £4.5 million flat by the Royal Albert Hall in West London and attended a British public school. There is also an extraordinary twist concerning the south coast town of Bournemouth, as we shall see.

While Russia increasingly resembles the Soviet police state of old, the domestic circumstances of these two cosseted young people represents to many of its less fortunate citizens that which is rotten in the largest country in the world.

Over the past two weeks, thousands of demonstrators have been arrested across Russia, many beaten by police, after taking to the streets to protest at the detention last month of opposition activist Alexei Navalny.

Navalny, 44, was apprehended on his arrival from Germany, where he had been treated for a near-fatal dose of the nerve agent Novichok. He is adamant that the assassination attempt was carried out by agents of the Russian security services on the orders of autocratic ‘poisoner’ Putin.

The Kremlin claims such allegations are a CIA-orchestrated smear. U.S. president Joe Biden, in his first phone call to Mr Putin since his inauguration, raised the issue of Navalny’s arrest.

Look-alike: Putin aged 17 (left) and his alleged daughter (right)

To no avail. On Tuesday, the opposition leader was jailed for three and a half years by a Moscow court for allegedly violating the terms of a suspended sentence handed down for a previous embezzlement conviction that was widely seen by those outside the Kremlin as trumped-up.

Why does Putin consider the activist such a threat? Because Navalny had started to land serious — and personal — blows.

Shortly before he returned to Russia, Navalny posted on his YouTube channel a compelling investigative exposé — now viewed more than 100 million times — of what he describes as ‘the biggest robbery in the history of Russia’.

The film,…