Russia Increases Spending On Military Propaganda In The Internet Sevenfold

An investigation.

As the war comes to Russia, threatening to pull millions of citizens out of propaganda hypnosis, the authorities are drastically increasing spending on pro-war content on the Internet.

The Internet Development Institute (IDI), affiliated with the presidential administration, will distribute 20 billion rubles in grants this year to create “patriotic content,” Meduza and Important Stories found out in a joint investigation.

Compared to 2022, funding for military propaganda online will increase by almost 7 times: at that time, the IDI issued grants worth about 3 billion rubles and supported 776 projects, including about a hundred on military topics.

This year, the institute, founded by entrepreneur German Klimenko and now headed by former AP employee Aleksey Goreslavsky, has already financed 163 projects totaling 10 billion rubles.

Among them “Ramzan. Akhmat is the Power of Russia”, “Russian code. Sovereign Future”, and “Russian Heritage. Homecoming”, which is a documentary film about the fate of architectural monuments in the Donbas. In addition, grants were given to a film about businessmen helping the army, “Made for the Front”, “Women Z” (about the wives of servicemen) and the project “Those Who Left, How Are You There?”.

The distribution of grants, as the investigators found out, is handled by the IDI Supervisory Board, which includes Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Sergey Kiriyenko, Head of the Presidential Department for Public Projects Sergey Novikov, Head of the State Duma Committee on Culture Elena Yampolskaya and RT Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan.

The main goal of the IDI is “network military-patriotic education” and pushing through the pro-government agenda on the Internet, a former employee of the organization told reporters. For these purposes, the institute is allocated an amount comparable to the budget of an average Russian city. For example, in Bryansk it is 16 billion rubles a year, in Volgograd — 31 billion.

In total, according to the budget law, in 2023 the government will spend about 100 billion rubles to finance state media.

Separately, almost 40 billion rubles will be allocated for “teaching patriotism to citizens” within the framework of the national project “Education”. Almost half of the total amount — 18 billion rubles — will go to the new “pioneers” (the Russian Movement of Children and Youth), which, according to the authorities, should unite 18 million schoolchildren and set up branches in all regions of the Russian Federation.

The budget will allocate another 14.6 billion rubles for the “development and implementation of a set of measures aimed at developing a system of civic and patriotic education” of students.