RT (Russia Today)

RT (formerly Russia Today) is an international television and digital propaganda network founded in 2005 by the Kremlin. Spear-headed by Vladimir Putin protégée Margarita Simonyan, it broadcasts and publishes online and in social networks in several languages, including English, Spanish, Arabic, German, French and Russian.

RT presents itself as an alternative to Western mainstream media. But it is a geo-political tool of interference and destabilisation that spreads anti-Western, anti-democratic, antisemitic and racist conspiracy theories. It has been banned in Europe following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The RT machine is widely regarded by governments, regulators, researchers and organizations monitoring disinformation as an instrument of Kremlin influence. The network has been criticized for disseminating propaganda, disinformation and conspiracy narratives, notably on Syria, Ukraine and cases involving opponents of the Russian regime. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, RT and Sputnik were suspended from broadcasting in the European Union in March 2022.

The project was created in the mid-2000s to expand Russia’s international media presence and improve the country’s image abroad. At launch, RT was attached to the state agency RIA Novosti via ANO TV-Novosti, a state-owned autonomous nonprofit organization receiving public subsidies for the network. In December 2013, RIA Novosti was dissolved and replaced by Rossiya Segodnya. RT also relied on the Berlin-based video agency Ruptly.

Simonyan, appointed editor-in-chief of Russia Today in 2005 at the age of 25, had previously worked as a war correspondent and as part of the Kremlin press pool. She is considered close to the Russian presidency and has received several official decorations, including the Russian Order of Merit for the Fatherland and the Order of Alexander Nevsky. She also publicly supported Putin, including by registering as a representative for his presidential campaigns in 2018 and 2024.

RT is one of the main beneficiaries of Russian public funding for international broadcasting. Its detailed accounts are not fully transparent, but figures compiled by researcher Maxime Audinet indicate a budget rising from roughly EUR 25 million at launch in 2005 to nearly EUR 334 million in 2020, making it one of the most heavily subsidized Russian state media operations outside the domestic broadcasting sector.

During its early years, RT focused largely on positive coverage of Russia: culture, the economy, Soviet heritage and Moscow’s international role. From the late 2000s onward, its editorial identity shifted toward systematic criticism of Western governments, institutions and media. In 2009, the network dropped the full name Russia Today in favor of the shorter acronym RT, a less explicitly Russian brand designed to accompany its international expansion.

The slogan “Question More” summarized this repositioning. RT sought to frame itself not as an official Russian outlet, but as an “alternative” platform giving airtime to views said to be excluded from mainstream media. This does not mean that every guest or contributor is aligned with the Kremlin. Rather, RT has proved able to gather highly diverse voices around a shared distrust of Western liberal democracies, their media systems and their foreign policies.

RT has also hired or hosted well-known figures to expand its audience, including WikiLeaks founder, conspiracy peddling fan of Putin, Iran’s Mullahs and Assad Julian Assange, former CNN host Larry King, financial broadcaster Max Keiser and, on RT France, French television host Frédéric Taddéï.

In the United States, T&R Productions, the company producing content for RT America, registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act in November 2017 as an agent of ANO TV-Novosti, the Russian government entity responsible for RT’s worldwide broadcasts. Its French-language branch, RT France, was launched first as a website in 2015 and then as a television channel in December 2017.

Propaganda, disinformation and conspiracy narratives

RT has repeatedly been accused of manipulating information and amplifying conspiracy narratives. In 2020, an article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists described RT as a tactical propaganda arm of the Russian government. RT’s own leadership has at times framed the channel’s mission in terms of “information war,” while Russian officials have likened the channel to an element of state power.

The network has given airtime to proponents of 9/11 conspiracy theories; in March 2010, for example, it broadcast a discussion titled “9/11: Whodunit?” Researchers of Russian conspiracism, including Ilya Yablokov, have shown that RT draws both on American conspiracy culture — narratives about the CIA, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati and similar motifs — and on post-Soviet narratives portraying NGOs and the U.S. government as subversive actors.

This strategy does not necessarily require viewers to believe every conspiracy claim. Its effect is often to blur the boundary between fact and fiction and to increase distrust toward institutions, governments, experts and mainstream media.

RT has become a recurring platform for the international conspiracy sphere. From Syria to Ukraine, it has amplified or legitimized narratives denying, relativizing or casting doubt on chemical attacks attributed to the Syrian regime and on Russian atrocities in Ukraine. Its coverage of the 2020 poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny followed a similar pattern, multiplying contradictory explanations rather than establishing a coherent factual account.

As early as 2005, RT was listed among the media partners of the “anti-imperialist” Axis for Peace conference in Brussels, organized by French conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan. The network has also intersected with broader conspiracist ecosystems, including outlets such as InfoWars and figures such as Alex Jones, while remaining distinct from them in its institutional status as a Russian state-backed media operation.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, RT also circulated misleading material, including a July 2020 video suggesting that protective masks recommended against Covid-19 did not work. In August 2021, RT’s Twitter account posted a manipulated image implying that Afghan evacuees were carrying firearms and a rocket launcher; the post was later deleted after criticism.

On February 27, 2022, three days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced the EU ban on RT and Sputnik. In September 2024, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned RT, Simonyan and several senior figures over alleged foreign malign influence operations linked to the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The U.S. Department of State then described TV-Novosti and related entities as part of RT’s global covert activities. Shortly afterwards, Meta banned RT and other Russian state media networks from its platforms globally for foreign interference activity.