Vladimir Sungorkin is one of Russia’s top propagandists, and his newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda is considered the mouthpiece of the Kremlin. During a trip to the Far East, Putin’s confidant dies unexpectedly.
In Russia, the editor-in-chief of the country’s highest-circulation newspaper, Komsomolskaya Pravda, has died unexpectedly. Vladimir Sungorkin died during a business trip in the Primorsky Krai in Russia’s Far East, his daily reports. It is said that the 68-year-old suffered a stroke during a research expedition. Just last weekend, in the same region, a high-ranking manager from the energy sector died under strange circumstances. Ivan Peshorin’s body was pulled out of the water Monday in Vladivostok, the administrative center of Primorye. Since the start of the war of aggression against Ukraine, businessmen and civil servants have died, some of them mysterious.
Sungorkin was one of Russia’s most important propagandists. The Komsomolskaya Pravda, which he runs, is described in the media as President Vladimir Putin’s “favorite newspaper”. The KP publishing house, headed by Sungorkin, is one of the largest and most influential in Russia. Sungorkin was considered a media manager who was particularly close to the government. Among other things, he was Putin’s trustee in the presidential election in 2018.
The tabloid almost always supports the Kremlin’s course and rarely allows itself criticism of individual officials. “Komsomolskaya Pravda” appears daily in several regional editions and has a total circulation of over 800,000 copies. The weekly “Komsomolskaya Pravda Tolstuschka” (“The Fat”) has a circulation of over three million copies. The newspaper’s website is the most popular media site in Russia, with 65 million monthly visitors.
Sungorkin has been working as a journalist at the newspaper since 1985, since 1997 he has been the editor-in-chief and since 2002 the general director of the publishing house. The journalist was awarded numerous orders of merit. In April 2022, the European Union put Sungorkin on its sanctions list, designating him as one of the main players in Russian propaganda.
Kremlin chief Putin expressed his condolences to the propagandist’s family and friends. Sungorkin’s death is “a great loss for domestic journalism, for all of us,” said a letter of condolence published on the Kremlin’s website. “He was a patriot, an extraordinary, creatively gifted, talented person.”
Sungorkin’s colleagues were also dismayed at his death. In a post on Telegram, the editor-in-chief of the RT news agency, which is loyal to the Kremlin, Margarita Simonyan, spoke in the warmest of tones about a mushroom hike that she said she had undertaken with Sungorkin last year. Sungorkin was happy and cheerful and “made fun of everyone, especially himself,” wrote the propagandist. “As I was told, that’s how he was yesterday when he died. Hiking, in the forest, on the go,” said Simonyan. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was also making jokes about himself and his stroke at that moment.”
