Natalia Poklonskaya Biography

Natalia Poklonskaya was born March 18, 1980, in Mikhailovka, a village in Perevalsk Raion, Voroshilovgrad Oblast, of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In 1990, she and her family moved to Yevpatoria in Crimea.

Her retired parents live in Crimea. Both her paternal and maternal grandfathers died during World War II. In 2002, she graduated from the University of Internal Affairs in the Ukrainian city of Yevpatoria.

Following her graduation, Natalia Poklonskaya worked at the Ukrainian Prosecutor's Office, as an assistant prosecutor to the Acting Prosecutor of the Republic of Crimea. From 2002 to 2006, she worked as the assistant attorney of the Crimean district Krasnogvardeisky.

From 2006 to 2010, she was the assistant attorney of Yevpatoria. She also worked with the Prosecutor's Office of Crimea from 2010 and 2011, mostly dealing with organized crime as the deputy chief of a surveillance unit.

In 2011, she successfully prosecuted Ruvim Aronov, a leader of Crimea’s Bashmaki gang. In December that year, she was threatened and eventually assaulted, in a revenge attack, that caused her partial facial paralysis.

Poklonskaya took over as the Senior Prosecutor of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine on December 12, 2012 and continued in the position till March 11, 2014. In March 2014, during Russia’s Crimean annexation, she took over as the Prosecutor of the Republic of Crimea. Since then, she has been against Ukraine's entry into the European Union. She continued in office till October 6, 2016.

She was elected as a Member of the State Duma, the Lower House of the Russian federal assembly, in 2016 and assumed office on October 5, 2016. She continued till October 12, 2021. From October 2021 to February 2022, she served as Vladimir Putin’s Ambassador to Cape Verde, though the appointment was later canceled due to personal reasons.

Putin appointed her as the Deputy Head of Rossotrudnichestvo (an autonomous Russian federal agency that aims at maintaining contacts with the Russian diaspora abroad) in February 2022. However, Poklonskaya made global headlines when she was dismissed from her position by Putin in June 2022.

The reason for her dismissal was, apparently, her criticism of Russia’s war on Ukraine in 2022. Though in 2014, she supported Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea, Poklonskaya criticized the meaningless destruction of life and property in Ukraine in 2022. In April 2022, she termed the war a “catastrophe.”

She was also against the use of “Z” symbol, which represents support for the Russian forces in Ukraine. This came at a time when Russia snuffed out all criticism of its invasion in Ukraine by making it a crime with a punishment of up to 15 years of imprisonment.

In Ukraine, she has been wanted on charges of treason for supporting the Crimean separatists, for criminal organization, for outlawing the Crimean Tatars’ representative body, and persecuting Ukrainian citizens during the Crimean annexation. Poklonskaya reportedly traveled to Ukraine to help the Ukrainians amid the war.

RIA Novosti, a Russian state-controlled media outlet, reported in March that she had visited Ukraine to deliver food and medicine to the war-ravaged citizens of the country. However, Ukraine has still not forgiven her for her previous support for the Crimean separatists. Following her dismissal, she took over as the Advisor to Igor Viktorovich Krasnov, the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation, on June 14, 2022.

Natalia Poklonskaya is better known to her fans as Nyasha (a hybrid word of Russian and Japanese language, meaning “a very cute girl”). In 2014, while working as the Prosecutor General of Crimea, she became a sensation on the internet because of her striking good looks.

Her fans created several social media channels and often posted fan-art, photographs, discussions about her. Poklonskaya soon became a cult figure of sorts on the internet.

A series of manga cartoons on her surfaced online, and she became popular with anime fans, too. In fact, she used an anime of her with a Russian flag as her Telegram display picture.

She had several fan clubs in Asia. Her fans even composed songs on her.

Natalia Poklonskaya has several awards and honors to her credit, including the Medal for Fidelity to Duty, the Badge Pride of the Fatherland, the Order of Saint Anastasia (July 2014), the Order for Faithfulness (March 2015), the Order of Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna (May 2015), the Order of the Holy Empress Alexandra Feodorovna (July 2015), the Medal for Sacrificial Service, and the Medal of Honor for Merits in Protection of Children of Russia.

Natalia Poklonskaya has been quite secretive of her personal life. When she once failed to reveal her husband’s name in her financial declarations, she stated she was engaged but had broken up, and that she had just claimed she was married to get rid of unwanted male attention.

According to reports, she married lawyer and politician Ivan Nikolaevich Soloviev, or Ivan Solovyov, in Crimea, on August 13, 2018. They were apparently divorced in September 2019.

She has a daughter named Anastasiya who, some reports state, was born in 2005. Poklonskaya follows the Eastern Orthodox Church. She also plays the piano well.