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Russia’s Putin Says His Young Family Members Speak Fluent Mandarin Chinese 

Russian President Vladimir Putin holds an open lesson “Talking of What Matters” at the secondary school No 20 named after Heroes of the Fatherland in Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva, Russia, 02 September 2024. (EPA/ Vyacheslav Prokofyev / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool)
Russian President Vladimir Putin holds an open lesson “Talking of What Matters” at the secondary school No 20 named after Heroes of the Fatherland in Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva, Russia, 02 September 2024. (EPA/ Vyacheslav Prokofyev / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool)
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Russia’s Putin Says His Young Family Members Speak Fluent Mandarin Chinese 

Russian President Vladimir Putin holds an open lesson “Talking of What Matters” at the secondary school No 20 named after Heroes of the Fatherland in Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva, Russia, 02 September 2024. (EPA/ Vyacheslav Prokofyev / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool)
Russian President Vladimir Putin holds an open lesson “Talking of What Matters” at the secondary school No 20 named after Heroes of the Fatherland in Kyzyl, Republic of Tuva, Russia, 02 September 2024. (EPA/ Vyacheslav Prokofyev / Sputnik / Kremlin Pool)

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Monday that young members of his family speak fluent Mandarin, though he told school children they should not forget the importance of English too despite the growing popularity of Chinese.

Putin has two daughters with his ex-wife Lyudmila and they speak Russian, English, German, and French. Putin, who divorced his wife in 2014, rarely speaks about his family but has at least three grandchildren, according to Russian media.

"Some of my family members, the little ones, speak Chinese too - they speak it fluently," Putin told pupils of Secondary School No. 20 in Kyzyl, Tuva, about 4,500 km (2,800 miles) east of Moscow.

Amid a growing partnership between China and Russia, Mandarin has been growing in popularity across Russia as a foreign language of choice, a trend Putin said was due to developing contacts across economics, politics and society.

Putin, who speaks fluent German but has also taken lessons to improve his English, said that pupils should not forget the importance of English.

"English is a great language, it has given humanity a great deal in terms of combining knowledge and uniting people in the field of culture, and so on," Putin said.

Russian, English, Tatar, German and Chechen are the most widely spoken languages in Russia, according to the 2022 census. While Mandarin is spoken far less, it has been growing swiftly in popularity in recent years as a foreign language.

Putin and China's President Xi Jinping in May pledged a "new era" of partnership between the two most powerful rivals of the United States, which they cast as an aggressive Cold War hegemon sowing chaos across the world.

China and Russia declared a "no limits" partnership in February 2022 when Putin visited Beijing just days before he sent tens of thousands of troops into Ukraine, triggering the deadliest land war in Europe since World War Two.

English is the world's most spoken language with about 1.5 billion speakers, followed by Mandarin Chinese with about 1.1 billion speakers, and then Hindi, Spanish, Arabic, French, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Urdu, according to Ethnologue, a language research center.

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2 Private Lunar Landers Head Toward the Moon in Roundabout Journey

The Blue Ghost Mission 1 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from NASA's Launch Complex 39A at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, 15 January 2025. EPA/CRISTOBAL HERRERA-ULASHKEVICH
The Blue Ghost Mission 1 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from NASA's Launch Complex 39A at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, 15 January 2025. EPA/CRISTOBAL HERRERA-ULASHKEVICH
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2 Private Lunar Landers Head Toward the Moon in Roundabout Journey

The Blue Ghost Mission 1 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from NASA's Launch Complex 39A at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, 15 January 2025. EPA/CRISTOBAL HERRERA-ULASHKEVICH
The Blue Ghost Mission 1 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from NASA's Launch Complex 39A at the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA, 15 January 2025. EPA/CRISTOBAL HERRERA-ULASHKEVICH

In a two-for-one moonshot, SpaceX launched a pair of lunar landers Wednesday for US and Japanese companies looking to jumpstart business on Earth’s dusty sidekick.
The two landers rocketed away in the middle of the night from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, the latest in a stream of private spacecraft aiming for the moon, The Associated Press reported. They shared the ride to save money but parted company an hour into the flight exactly as planned, taking separate roundabout routes for the monthslong journey.
It’s take 2 for the Tokyo-based ispace, whose first lander crashed into the moon two years ago. This time, it has a rover on board with a scoop to gather up lunar dirt for study and plans to test potential food and water sources for future explorers.
Lunar newcomer Texas-based Firefly Aerospace is flying 10 experiments for NASA, including a vacuum to gather dirt, a drill to measure the temperature below the surface and a device that could be used by future moonwalkers to keep the sharp, abrasive particles off their spacesuits and equipment.
Firefly’s Blue Ghost — named after a species of US Southeastern fireflies — should reach the moon first. The 6-foot-6-inches-tall (2-meter-tall) lander will attempt a touchdown in early March at Mare Crisium, a volcanic plain in the northern latitudes.
The slightly bigger ispace lander named Resilience will take four to five months to get there, targeting a touchdown in late May or early June at Mare Frigoris, even farther north on the moon’s near side.
“We don’t think this is a race. Some people say ‘race to the moon,’ but it’s not about the speed,” ispace’s founder CEO Takeshi Hakamada said this week from Cape Canaveral.
Both Hakamada and Firefly CEO Jason Kim acknowledge the challenges still ahead, given the wreckage littering the lunar landscape. Only five countries have successfully placed spacecraft on the moon since the 1960s: the former Soviet Union, the US, China, India and Japan.
“We’ve done everything we can on the design and the engineering,” Kim said. Even so, he pinned an Irish shamrock to his jacket lapel Tuesday night for good luck.
The US remains the only one to have landed astronauts. NASA’s Artemis program, the successor to Apollo, aims to get astronauts back on the moon by the end of the decade.
Before that can happen, “we’re sending a lot of science and a lot of technology ahead of time to prepare for that,” NASA's science mission chief Nicky Fox said on the eve of launch.
If acing their respective touchdowns, both spacecraft will spend two weeks operating in constant daylight, shutting down once darkness hits.
Once lowered onto the lunar surface, ispace’s 11-pound (5-kilogram) rover will stay near the lander, traveling up to hundreds of yards (meters) in circles at a speed of less than one inch (a couple centimeters) per second. The rover has its own special delivery to drop off on the lunar dust: a toy-size red house designed by a Swedish artist.
NASA is paying $101 million to Firefly for the mission and another $44 million for the experiments. Hakamada declined to divulge the cost of ispace’s rebooted mission with six experiments, saying it's less than the first mission that topped $100 million.
Coming up by the end of February is the second moonshot for NASA by Houston-based Intuitive Machines. Last year, the company achieved the first US lunar touchdown in more than a half-century, landing sideways near the south pole but still managing to operate.