By Brian McDonald, Substack, 9/4/26
On Thursday [9/3], Russia analyst Anton Barbashin asked on X: “Do some journalists really have access to people from the Russian president’s inner circle? Why would such sources share sensitive information with the foreign press? Is this always manipulation?”
The answer to the first question is yes, and the answer to the second is that the people with the best access are generally the people least inclined to shout it from the rooftops.
There are a handful of journalists at Kommersant, RIA, Vedomosti, RBC and the major state broadcasters who genuinely know people in and around Putin’s inner circle and while nobody leaves them unattended with the filing cabinets, they know enough to recognise what’s really going on around the place.
Alexei Venediktov is an interesting case because, despite being designated a foreign agent, as Barbashin is too, incidentally, the former Echo of Moscow boss quite obviously still speaks to people at the top, but the difference is that the arm holding him at arm’s length has become considerably longer. So is the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg, who has become less a correspondent than a recurring character in Moscow’s political pantomime (and, to be fair to him, he seems perfectly aware of the part he is playing).
Then there are the journalists who remain inside the tent and, here Kommersant’s Andrey Kolesnikov is a good example, as his reports are often ironic and surprisingly sharp, but he knows where the limits lie. Thus, what he doesn’t do is claim that Putin privately told the Security Council Russia will be invading Armenia next Thursday, or write about the private lives of officials.
Which brings us to the Western press. When the FT, Economist, Bloomberg, New York Times or Wall Street Journal announces that somebody in Putin’s immediate circle has anonymously revealed what the Russian president secretly thinks, scepticism is generally the most advisable reaction.
People familiar with Moscow’s media world can often make a reasonable guess at who these mysterious interlocutors are and some may indeed be “close to the Kremlin”, though in approximately the sense that a man drinking in a pub near Clarence House is close to the King.
They know people who know people, but knowing a man who knows a man who once spoke to a man isn’t quite the same thing as sitting beside Putin, and they also evidently haven’t heard my erstwhile Irish editor’s maxim of “believe a quarter of what you hear, and half of what you see.”
Yet something miraculous happens during the journey west, as the further information travels from the Kremlin, the closer its source seems to get to Putin.
Since 2022, most Western organisations have closed or drastically reduced their Moscow operations, meaning that the correspondent who might once have met somebody over coffee or beer inside the Garden Ring is now sitting in Berlin, London, Riga, Tbilisi or New York, and operating online.
And here Barbashin’s second question becomes much more interesting, because let’s suppose you really were close enough to Putin to know the secrets routinely attributed to anonymous sources, well, why, in Russia in 2026, would you secretly transmit them to a foreign newspaper?
The paradox is therefore rather delicious, in that the more sensitive the supposed revelation, the more senior the source must be in order to know it, which naturally means his decision to leak it becomes even more puzzling.
There is, however, another explanation for some anonymous briefings, and it’s considerably less romantic. Sometimes the Kremlin wants the information published, but when it does, it hardly needs a trembling conspirator smuggling secrets through Checkpoint Charlie.
The Presidential Administration contains Alexei Gromov, Andrei Tsybulin, Sergei Kiriyenko and Alexander Smirnov alongside Dmitry Peskov, and they haven’t spent decades dealing with journalists without discovering how journalists work.
Reuters has often been an important conduit for anonymous signalling of this sort, with CNN and AP sometimes occupying similar territory.
Whether Reuters retains precisely the same position is now worth watching. Its Moscow bureau leadership is changing this week, with Kommersant suggesting that outgoing bureau chief Guy Faulconbridge’s departure followed dissatisfaction that his Russia coverage was too objective for contemporary British tastes.