Outlet profile

Pravda.ru

Russian nationalist, pro-Kremlin

Owned byPravda.ru Holding, a private company headed by founder and CEO Vadim Gorshenin

FundingAdvertising revenue and contractual agreements with regional municipalities; privately held and not directly funded by the Russian state budget

On the administrationmixed

Background

Pravda.ru was launched on January 27, 1999, by a group of senior editors who had worked at the original Soviet Pravda before it was sold by President Boris Yeltsin to a Greek business family in 1992. The founders—including Viktor Afanasiev, Gennady Seleznev, Yuri Zhukov, Vera Tkachenko, and Vadim Gorshenin—wanted to continue journalism under the Pravda brand in the new medium of the internet. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation, which had acquired the print Pravda, challenged their right to the name, but an arbitration court ruled in Pravda.ru's favor, finding that non-print outlets could use the name freely. The site gained unexpected international attention in 2013 when U.S. Senator John McCain published an op-ed on it, apparently believing it was the historic Soviet paper. Independent media watchdogs rate the outlet poorly: NewsGuard assigns it a score of 7.5 out of 100, citing promotion of disinformation narratives, particularly about Ukraine, and Media Bias/Fact Check classifies it as right-biased with very low factual reporting. Although Pravda.ru is not directly funded by the Russian federal budget—distinguishing it from state outlets like RT and Sputnik—it consistently amplifies Kremlin talking points and anti-Western narratives. Like much of Russia's pro-government media landscape, it welcomed Trump's initially conciliatory signals toward Moscow in early 2025 but grew more critical as U.S.-Russia tensions persisted and Trump's stance on Putin became less predictable.

Sources

Profile compiled 2026-07-22; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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