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Putin’s mouthpieces earn £800k a year for Kremlin propaganda
Leaked financial records reveal 63 wartime media figures collectively took home £25.6m
Vladimir Putin’s leading propagandists are earning hundreds of thousands of pounds a year, according to a new investigation.
Leaked records seen by the independent Russian media outlet Verstka reveal the fortunes of some of the Russian president’s top mouthpieces.
They are Putin’s salesmen for his war and consist of state television hosts, war correspondents, ultranationalist bloggers and influencers.
The figures show the fortunes to be earned for those at the forefront of the Kremlin’s wartime media machine.
The outlet analysed the earnings of 63 propagandists whose collective income amounted to three billion roubles a year (£25.6m).
Just 6 per cent of the funds were doled out to pro-war bloggers and others in that category, while about one quarter of the money was earned by television presenters, whose average annual incomes were triple that of the bloggers, despite declining ratings for TV news programmes.
One top earner Dimitri Simes, a Russian-American pundit and former unofficial foreign policy adviser to Richard Nixon, rakes in around 97.32m roubles (£833,000) annually for his role as co-host of state-run Channel One’s Bolshaya Igra (The Great Game), a geopolitical talk show
Another, Dmitry Kiselyov, the ultra-conservative director general of state-controlled news agency group Rossiya Segodnya and long-time host of Vesti Nedeli (News of the Week), a current affairs show, earns 70.58m roubles per year (£606,000).
Their salaries outpace that of most military bloggers. Verstka found that those operating closest to the front line could often expect to reap the lowest rewards.
Topping the ranking is Boris Rozhin, a military analyst blogging as Colonel Cassad to almost 750,000 subscribers on Telegram, who makes frequent appearances on state television as a guest expert, but has been accused of reprinting much of his content from other channels.
The Channel One regular earns 2.6m roubles per month (£22,200), most of which came from payments handed out by a production company producing politics programmes for Channel One.
Earning a more modest income is Maryana Naumova, a former teenage powerlifting prodigy who was banned for doping in 2016 and later positioned herself as a front-line correspondent after taking a course in the subject organised by Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mercenary Wagner Group.
Sanctioned by Kyiv for her frequent visits to occupied territories, Naumova, who now works as a presenter on the socio-political talk show Vremya Pokazhet (Time Will Tell) on Channel One alongside blogging on Telegram, earns some 9m roubles per year (£77,000).
Irina Kuksenkova, another correspondent working in the line of fire for Channel One, pulls in 6.263m roubles annually, equivalent to almost £54,000.
The popularity of Russia’s three main state-run channels has seen a steep decline this year, with a 33 per cent collapse in viewing figures observed between January and April, according to data from the media-monitoring organisation Mediascope.
This followed a 40 per cent drop in the audience of state TV between 2017 and 2024, equivalent to around 25 million viewers.
Earlier this month, Russian media reported that Putin was considering firing Mr Kiselyov, the Vesti Nedeli host, amid plummeting viewer interest in his show.
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