Ex-Russian TV Editor: Putin Receives Private News Bulletins Since 2011

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been receiving separate news bulletins, not broadcast on television and intended solely for him, since 2011, according to Dmitry Skorobutov, former editor-in-chief of the Vesti program on the Rossiya-1 television channel.

In an interview with And Graham Came Out, Skorobutov said that during his time at the channel, the internal project was codenamed “The Main Viewer.”

Skorobutov, who began his career on the program Namedni under journalist Leonid Parfenov, later worked at VGTRK and became editor-in-chief of Vesti in 2006 at the age of 26.

“It was like this. Let’s say a regular Vesti bulletin aired at 8 p.m., after which the production crew stayed. We had instructions, accordingly, on what news to leave in this bulletin, what to add, where to embellish, where to remove, so that Putin would then be shown an ideal picture of the beautiful Russia of today,” he said.

“So, that’s how good a president he is,” he added.

Skorobutov said the format was introduced after mass protests in Moscow in 2011 under the slogan “For Fair Elections,” which became some of the largest demonstrations in Russia’s recent history.

“[Putin’s entourage] were all shaken by Bolotnaya Square, and they tried to isolate him from real events, from the information environment, not to mention any contact with the outside world. That’s how it works,” he said.

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According to Skorobutov, the level of filtered information has increased further in recent years, particularly regarding Russia’s war against Ukraine.

He claimed that frontline reporting began to be increasingly restricted after April 2022, following Ukraine’s sinking of the Black Sea Fleet flagship Moskva.

“What I see now is simply a nightmare. He knows little about real events and very little about what’s happening in the war,” he said.

Skorobutov said he was once a strong supporter of Putin but later changed his views after leaving state media following a dispute with VGTRK management in 2017.

In 2020, Skorobutov was granted political asylum in Switzerland after becoming a public critic of censorship in Russian state television.