The Russian TV star who became the voice of the Kremlin

Summary
Dmitry Kiselyov rose through the aftershocks of the Cold War and emerged as Vladimir Putin’s propagandist-in-chiefFor tens of millions of television viewers across Russia’s 11 time zones, Sunday night means tuning in to watch Dmitry Kiselyov.
The country’s most influential news anchor, Kiselyov has for over a decade interpreted world events for the nation, as Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather once did for the U.S. His weekly current affairs show, “News of the Week," at first glance seems similar to any news bulletin on CNN or the BBC, with its tense intro music and opening sequence showing a large ticking clock.
The message he broadcasts is anything but.
There are breathless updates on Russia’s military advances, with cinematic shots of jet fighters pounding Ukrainian towns. Clips from pride parades in San Francisco are shown as evidence the U.S. verges on collapse. Kiselyov recently struck a positive note on President Trump, echoing the Kremlin, but warned that his tariff threats might torpedo Russia’s good will toward him.
One recent report began with an apocalyptic warning to the West: Russia won’t hesitate to use nuclear bombs if it feels threatened. Footage of President Vladimir Putin addressing Kremlin officials was interspersed with clips of missiles flying through the air.
“Don’t complain later," Kiselyov intoned in his trademark raspy voice. “Don’t tell us that we didn’t warn you."
Russia has blocked Western social-media platforms and driven independent journalists into exile, entrenching TV’s role as the country’s primary news source. As Putin deepens ties with U.S. adversaries and angles for a Ukraine peace deal with Trump that would leave swaths of land under Russian control, Kiselyov helps ensure that ordinary Russians are kept onside.
Dressed in tailored suits, the 70-year-old presenter strides across the studio, speaking softly as if peeling back the curtain to show viewers the truth no one wants them to know.
“The goal of any TV presenter is to break through the screen to enter on the other side into the viewer’s kitchen or living room, so that he feels I’m talking specifically to him," Kiselyov said from Moscow in his first Western media interview since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
“Entering his consciousness, his soul, is of course the main goal."
Kiselyov once cut a very different figure. In the early ’90s he defied Soviet censorship to shed light on pro-independence protests sweeping Eastern Europe. He revered the BBC, and encouraged Ukraine’s Western path during a stint working in Kyiv in the 2000s. The story of how he went from fresh-faced admirer of Western news networks during the Yeltsin years to become a driving force behind Putin’s propaganda machine offers a window into how so many of the country’s top thinkers and influential voices ultimately bound their futures to the Russian leader.
They include Dmitry Trenin, who gave up promoting U.S.-Russia relations as the head of an American-backed think tank and supported the invasion. Vladimir Solovyov, a journalist who once said only a "criminal of unimaginable proportions" could go to war with Ukraine, now hosts a paean to Putin on national TV. Dmitry Medvedev spent four years as president when Putin hit term limits in 2008. He promised liberalization and closer ties with the U.S. during a visit to Silicon Valley, but now calls for Ukraine’s total destruction and frequently rails about the threat of nuclear war.
Russian billionaires hit by Western sanctions have returned home from Europe and tacitly endorsed Putin’s rule. Russian musicians now accept offers to perform in occupied parts of Ukraine. Some, like 33-year-old pop star Shaman, have received state medals and invitations to the Kremlin for recording pro-war songs aimed at uniting the country around Putin. At least three TV anchors are serving lawmakers. One is a presidential adviser. There have been no high-level defections, despite what Western intelligence agencies initially predicted.
Throwing in his lot with the Kremlin has elevated Kiselyov into explainer-in-chief of Kremlin policy. While dissidents are pushed to the margins or sometimes killed, his show casts Putin as the only guarantor of stability in a hostile world, his war an existential struggle to safeguard Russia against the domineering West. Both the U.S. and European Union have Kiselyov on their sanctions blacklists.
In Kiselyov’s telling, evidence of Russian atrocities in Ukraine is the fabrication of Hollywood producers, Kremlin critics are Western puppets and traitors, and liberalism is an ideology the U.S. spreads to weaken the moral fabric of countries that threaten its hegemony.
He never mentions Russia’s colossal military casualties in Ukraine, and ignores the economic fallout from the war inside Russia, assuring viewers that Western countries are faring far worse. When Russia failed to avert a rebel takeover of Syria in December, Kiselyov blamed the collapse on the Syrian regime that Moscow has backed for years.
His catchphrase—“A coincidence? I think not!"—has become a Russian internet meme.
As a young man, Kiselyov said he ran afoul of the conservative Soviet authorities by notching up so many divorces—three by the time he was 23—that they likely held him back in his career. Working at a plucky new TV channel in the waning years of Soviet power in 1990, he refused to read out on air a misleading Kremlin report about a lethal crackdown on pro-independence protests in Lithuania, a Soviet republic. Lithuania’s post-Soviet authorities gave Kiselyov a state prize, which they have since rescinded.
Later he joined the freewheeling media landscape of 1990s Russia, when Boris Yeltsin opened the economy and mudslinging anchors attacked each other on networks owned by rival oligarchs.
A trained classical guitarist who studied French and Scandinavian languages, Kiselyov vacationed at ski resorts in the Alps and traveled across the continent as the presenter of a show on European culture made with funding from the EU.
His short-lived sixth marriage, in 1998, was to a British woman, and he sent one of his sons to a private school in the British Cotswolds. His late brother Andrei moved to Colorado and became a U.S. citizen. Kiselyov built a Scandinavian-style home outside Moscow with materials brought in from Finland and stables for his horses.
At work, Kiselyov was such a stickler for journalistic standards that producers working on a BBC-funded Russian show about best practices in TV journalism selected him as one of the presenters. Anna Narinskaya, a journalist who worked on the show with Kiselyov in the 1990s, described him as “the most ardent defender of journalistic ethics I had ever met."
In one episode, Kiselyov warned about the dangers of mixing journalism and propaganda. “If we keep lowering our standards and our morals and principles, then eventually we’ll find ourselves swimming in the dirt like pigs and eating each other together with the mud," he said.
When he became president in 2000, Putin moved quickly to rein in the power of Russia’s powerful TV networks. Unable to find work in Moscow, Kiselyov moved to Kyiv as the editor in chief of ICTV, a new channel owned by Ukrainian oligarch Viktor Pinchuk. Ukraine’s then-president, Leonid Kuchma, was promising to bring the country into the European Union.
In Kyiv, Kiselyov became a vocal Ukrainian patriot, wearing Ukraine’s colors to soccer matches and traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirts to events.
“I feel more Ukrainian," he said in a TV interview filmed in Kyiv at the time. “I am now invested in Ukraine as a part of it."
He soon adjusted his views. When protesters took to the streets of Kyiv in the Orange Revolution to dispute a pro-Russian candidate’s rigged victory in 2004, he said he saw it as a Western-backed coup. No longer did he consider Ukraine as a model for Russia to one day enter the EU, too. He now said Russia should chart its own course, independently of the West.
“I returned to Moscow in 2005 as if from a battlefield, and understood that we don’t need this in Russia," he said.
Former colleagues say there’s more to the story. For an ambitious TV presenter, Russia was a far more lucrative market—and in the mid-2000s, when Kiselyov came back, it was flush with money from an oil boom. Ex-colleagues say Kiselyov saw Putin’s new brand of hypernationalism, and decided he must adapt to thrive.
Oleksandr Semiryadchenko, a friend and former ICTV colleague who introduced Kiselyov to his Ukrainian-speaking parents and later visited him in Moscow, described the Russian as an opportunist.
“Dima knows how to manipulate any situation to his benefit," Semiryadchenko said in an interview in Kyiv, using a shortened version of Kiselyov’s first name. “When it benefited him to be a democrat in Ukraine, he was a democrat in Ukraine. When it stopped being beneficial, he became a Russian imperialist propagandist in an imperialist, propagandistic Russia."
Kiselyov denies engaging in propaganda and says the nature of his work does not differ from that of CNN or the BBC.
Russia’s media landscape took a sharp rightward turn when Putin returned to power for a third term as president in 2012. Kiselyov was perfectly positioned to lead the charge. In April of that year, he argued that gay people “should be prohibited from donating blood and sperm." After death “their hearts should be either buried or cremated as unsuitable for the prolongation of life," he said. His studio audience broke out in applause.
Four months later, Kiselyov was named anchor of News of the Week, a famed current affairs show running since 2001. The following year, Putin also appointed him head of Rossiya Segodnya, a major state media group that includes Russia’s biggest newswire. In a speech to his staff, Kiselyov codified his new worldview. “The period of distilled, impartial journalism is over," he said. “Objectivity is a myth."
Kiselyov wasn’t just honing his beliefs. He had also spent years perfecting his style of speech and his ability to influence viewers, agonizing over his mannerisms. He described how he learned to open his body language to win viewers’ trust and worked on the subtle gestures that, when captured by the lens, can “tap in to the white matter of the brain, into the subconscious."
“I taught myself to walk in a new way, the way an actor strides across the stage," he said, citing inspiration from childhood trips to Moscow’s Maly Theater with his mother. The scripts he drafted for News of the Week sometimes contained quotations from famous Russian poets. He designed them to be both lyrical and simple, written in words, he said, “that every Russian housewife can understand."
When Russia seized Crimea and invaded east Ukraine in spring 2014 with the pretext of driving out a fascist government running Kyiv, Kiselyov was at the forefront of the nationalist hysteria that swept the country, and his viewership soared.
“Russia is the only country in the world realistically capable of turning the United States into radioactive ash," he said on the show in March 2014, standing in front of a screen depicting an enormous mushroom cloud. Kiselyov helped propel Putin’s popularity ratings to an record high, and repeatedly shored up his government when it needed it most.
Sergei Dorenko, a prominent news anchor, said in a public lecture three weeks before his death in 2019 that Putin watches only two TV programs: a political talk-show run by Vladimir Solovyov, and News of the Week. Kiselyov says he attends meetings in the Kremlin every few months, where current affairs topics such as the Russian economy or budget policies are discussed. “It’s a sort of exchange, an exchange of energies, of ideas," he says of the cooperation between his TV network and the Kremlin.
Today, the Kremlin trusts him to be its voice to the tens of millions who watch his show each week. The approach appears to be working: surveys by the independent Levada Center suggest there is widespread support for Putin and acceptance of the war that some Western officials say has claimed almost 200,000 Russian lives, though Western sociologists say it’s impossible to get an accurate picture of public opinion in the authoritarian state.
Ultimately, Kiselyov’s most important audience may be the officials to whom he owes his position. Putin has frequently taken up themes originally raised on News of the Week. In February, a week after Kiselyov ridiculed reports that the Church of England was considering assigning gender-neutral pronouns to God, Putin mentioned the initiative in his State of the Union address, quoting the Bible: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do."
Kiselyov, at left, in 2008 with then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, second from right, and other Russian TV news anchors.
When Kiselyov turned 70 in April, Putin called to thank him for his work. “Such great, prolific labor deserves the deepest respect," read a separate message from the president that was published on the Kremlin’s website.
Kiselyov denies receiving instructions from the government. After so many years advancing Kremlin talking-points to a national audience, he may not need them.
“Everyone knows the rules they’re playing by, what’s allowed and what isn’t," said Marina Ovsyannikova, a former state TV producer who stormed onto the set of a live news broadcast with an antiwar poster after the invasion of Ukraine, and later fled to France.
In Ukraine, Kiselyov’s former colleague, Semiryadchenko, says he should be tried for war crimes. “He bears a big part of the responsibility for the deaths Ukraine has suffered in this war," he said.
Kiselyov says such accusations are to be expected, and has an eye on his legacy.
“In the West they’ll curse and denounce me, saying I wanted to burn the hearts of gay people" once the war is over, he said. In Russia, he went on, “I’ll be fondly remembered for giving my people support in difficult times."
—Kate Vtorygina contributed to this article.
Write to Matthew Luxmoore at matthew.luxmoore@wsj.com