ACF has released a new investigation into Kremlin propagandist Nikita Mikhalkov and his show “Besogon”.

On Putin’s personal orders, fragments of Besogon were built into mandatory weekly “Conversations about Important Things” in schools and similar sessions in the army: teachers and officers are explicitly instructed to show these clips and discuss Mikhalkov’s views on patriotism, the war and “traditional values”. For each short fragment, Mikhalkov’s company “Besogon” receives hundreds of thousands of rubles from the state budget.

Mikhalkov’s main sponsor, however, is the state-owned oil company Rosneft, which since 2024 has been paying his company 5 million rubles per episode of Besogon, formally as “advertising” that does not actually appear in the programme. At the same time, we show how a man who denounces the “decadent West” has for years been pouring money into Spanish real estate: apartments on the coast, a unit in a medical spa complex and a villa in Sotogrande worth about €5 million, as well as housing for his second family — former TV presenter Maria Lemesheva and their daughter.

Mikhalkov’s story is a distilled example of Putin’s system, where schoolchildren are turned into a captive audience for propaganda, and the state and state-owned companies fund the luxurious lifestyles of loyal propagandists.