Pressure of Truth
Exposing the spin on all sides of the news.
Outlet profile

Pravda / RT-aligned network

Russian state / pro-Kremlin

Owned byRT is owned by the Russian state through the autonomous nonprofit ANO TV-Novosti, and Margarita Simonyan is its editor-in-chief. The 'Pravda' network (also called Portal Kombat) is a separate group of about 150 websites. Researchers link it to Moscow-based operators, but its exact ownership is not publicly documented. It has no connection to the Soviet-era newspaper Pravda.
FundingRT is funded mainly by the Russian federal budget. The Pravda network's funding is not disclosed. NewsGuard describes it as 'well-funded', and it publishes millions of articles a year, apparently with heavy automation.
On the administrationmixed

Background

RT (formerly Russia Today) launched in 2005 as a state-funded international broadcaster. Margarita Simonyan has led it since its start. The U.S. Treasury has called her a 'central figure in Russian government malign influence efforts.' In September 2024 the U.S. government accused RT of election interference and covert influence operations, and several Western countries restricted its broadcasts. The Pravda network launched in April 2022, after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and is also known as Portal Kombat. It is a group of about 150 websites that mostly republish content from Russian state media and aligned sources in many languages. A 2025 NewsGuard audit found that 10 major AI chatbots repeated false narratives from the network 33% of the time. Researchers call this tactic 'LLM grooming': publishing large volumes of content so that AI systems ingest it. Reports credit the network with about 3.6 million articles in 2024. Coverage in both RT and the Pravda network consistently reflects Kremlin positions on Ukraine, NATO and the West. On the Trump administration, Simonyan has welcomed what she described as the U.S. shedding its 'rainbow raincoat'. Russian commentary also stresses ideological differences between Trump's government and European elites. Because the network's reach depends partly on automated, low-engagement content, researchers note that its audience on its own sites is small even though its content can spread through search and AI tools.

Sources

  1. A well-funded Moscow-based global 'news' network has infected Western artificial intelligence tools worldwide with Russian propaganda (NewsGuard)
  2. Pravda network (Wikipedia)
  3. Russian disinformation 'infects' AI chatbots, researchers warn (France 24)
  4. U.S. Accuses Russia's RT News Outlet of Election Interference (The Moscow Times)
  5. Russia's Propagandists: Welcome to 2026, the Year of the Savage (CEPA)
  6. Margarita Simonyan (Wikipedia)

Profile compiled 2026-10-20; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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