Russian propaganda: how the Kremlin trains war ‘correspondents’ to work in the occupied territories of Ukraine
In Russia, a Kremlin-funded online school is training a generation of war ‘correspondents’ to work in the occupied Ukrainian territories. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns this new propaganda factory, which complements the systematic repression of independent journalists in order to destroy all access to independent information and impose the Kremlin's official account of the war in Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin announced back in March 2022 that he was waging an “information war”. This war includes training an army of propagandists to work in Ukraine’s occupied territories. In a photo posted on 8 April on Vkontakte, Russia’s Facebook equivalent, the “War Correspondents’ School” (“Shkola Voenkora”) showed its first class of graduates posing in front of a partially destroyed building in Ukraine’s occupied territories. The 20 graduates of this new online “journalism” school – which dispenses free training in how to become a war correspondent who toes the Kremlin line – received their diplomas on 12 March.
The program includes learning how to conduct interviews with Russian soldiers, the logistics of reporting and a reporting internship at the war front. The classes are taught by reporters who have worked in Ukraine’s occupied territories for Russian state media such as the TV news channel RT and the news agency Ria Novosti, and the pro-Kremlin newspaper Izvestia. Some of the people giving classes are key figures in the Russian propaganda system such as Alexander Malkevich, the founder of a network of media outlets in the occupied territories, and Sergei Mardan, a journalist with the pro-government tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda who is charged in Ukraine with “calls for genocide.”
“The Kremlin is grooming a new generation of 'war correspondents' – in reality an army of propagandists – to work in the occupied Ukrainian territories. The Russian forces meanwhile continue to suppress any dissenting voices with impunity, forcing independent journalists in Russia to choose between exile or prison, and tracking down those in the occupied territories who do not collaborate. RSF condemns these methods, which are designed to eliminate trustworthy journalism and a pluralistic media ecosystem in order to impose the official Kremlin narrative.
The online school was founded by Vera Kironenko, a 26-year-old Russian businesswoman and journalism school graduate, with the help of a grant of nearly 100,000 euros in 2023 from Russia’s presidential fund for cultural initiatives. Based in Tomsk, a city more than 3,500 km east of Moscow, she has promoted the school actively on social media. After inviting “journalists, students of specialised universities, writers, blog authors, filmmakers and all those who work in the media” to follow the ‘training course’, the school claimed, shortly after its launch in December 2023, to have more than 1,000 registered students. Officially, the Kremlin funding terminates at the end of April, but registration for a new class is already open.
The school is the latest contribution to Russia’s already extensive propaganda network. In September 2023, RSF denounced the training in “journalism trades” being provided at the Mediatopol centre, supported by the Russian occupation forces, in the southeastern Ukrainian city of Melitopol.
