In her early adult years, Lyudmila was a flight attendant for the Kaliningrad branch of Aeroflot. She met Vladimir Putin in Leningrad, and they married on 28 July 1983. The couple have two daughters, Mariya and Yekaterina . From 1990 to 1994, Lyudmila taught German at the Department of Philology of Leningrad State University. For a few years prior to Vladimir's appointment as Prime Minister of Russia in 1999, she was a Moscow representative of the company Telecominvest.
First Lady
After Vladimir's rise to political power, Lyudmila maintained a low profile on the Russian political stage, generally avoiding the limelight except as required by protocol and restricting her public role to supportive statements about her husband.
Role in spelling controversy
As First Lady, Lyudmila Shkrebneva was a curator of a fund that aimed to develop the Russian language and sometimes produced statements concerning Russian language and education. Her preference for "maintaining and preserving" the Russian language led her to make public statements against orthographic reform. The Russian Academy of Science sponsored a commission to study the orthography of the Russian language and propose changes. Their recommendations were made public in 2002 after eight years of work, but were subsequently rejected by Shkrebneva, who used Russia's burgeoning economy as one of her reasons why the orthographic reform was not just unnecessary but untimely. However, although one newspaper in Moscow alleged that "Lyudmila Shkrebneva de facto cancelled any attempts to reform spelling," the fact remains that public and academic reaction to the reforms was sufficiently negative to have that particular reform attempt abandoned.
Divorce
On 6 June 2013, she and Putin publicly announced the termination of their marriage based on a mutual decision. The divorce announcement was made on camera for the Russian news media at the State Kremlin Palace during the intermission of a performance by the Kremlin Ballet, ending years of speculation about their relationship. In April 2014, the Kremlin confirmed that their divorce had been finalized. In January 2016, Lyudmila was reported to have married a man named Artur Ocheretny in early 2015.
Controversies
According to Reuters, Lyudmila Putina controls the Centre for the Development of Inter-personal Communications. The CDIC's offices are located in the center of Moscow, on Vozdvizhenka Street in the building previously known as Volkonsky House, which is its own property. The building, which once belonged to Leo Tolstoy's grandfather, was listed in Russian cultural heritage register but was completely rebuilt in 2013, raising its height from two stories to four, despite numerous objections and protests by Moscow citizens including an unanswered appeal to Vladimir Putin signed by 200 famous science and cultural persons of the city. The building is mainly occupied by commercial tenants, including VTB Bank, Sberbank, a construction company called Severstroygroup, a sushi restaurant, and a Burger King. Total rent from the building is about $3–4 million. Tenants pay their rent to a company known as Meridian, which is in turn owned by a company known as Intererservis, which is wholly owned by Lyudmila Alexandrovna Shkrebnyova. Her sister, Olga Alexandrovna Tsomayeva, was previously General Director of Intererservis. Artur Ocheretny, Shkrebnyova's current husband, chairs the CDIC's management board.
