The head of a propaganda media outlet was fired in Russia for covering the Wagner riots

In Russia, the general director of the TASS propaganda agency, Sergei Mikhailov, was fired for covering the Wagner PMC uprising in too much detail. The Moscow Times reported this on Saturday, November 4, citing five sources among senior officials.

It is noted that Mikhailov, who headed TASS since 2012, lost his position on July 5 and was punished after the Wagner riot, which caused the careers of several generals.

The Kremlin’s complaint against Mikhailov was the overzealous “news” coverage of the details of the capture of the headquarters in the Southern Federal District at a time when the authorities showed public weakness and panic. TASS was one of the first – early in the morning on Saturday June 24 – to publish photos from Rostov, which clearly proved that Wagner fighters occupied the city center and blocked the headquarters of the military command in Ukraine.

“TASS is all very detailed and very fast. Some kind of madness has happened to them. They have forgotten that their main task is not to report the news,” said a government source.

The Kremlin, where all the media is kept under strict control, is not satisfied at the same stage with Prigozhin’s rebellion and the generally insufficient level of propaganda on the part of TASS, said a source in the management of agency and confirmed by an interlocutor in the Kremlin. The First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration, which manages the media, Alexei Gromov, “is absolutely furious,” a source told TASS in the publication.

The last straw for the Kremlin was the information that Mikhailov left Moscow when Wagner’s armored cars were marching towards the capital, and the business jets of oligarchs and officials were flying out of the airports. Mikhailov himself said that during the June events “was in his office.”

The government appointed the author of the film “Putin” (2018), deputy general director of the state-owned All-Russian State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK) and former press secretary of the election headquarters of Russian president Andrei Kondrashov as the new general director.

Let’s recall that on June 23, the head of the Wagner PMC, Yevgeny Prigozhin, announced a demarche against the Russian military leadership, including against the Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu. On June 24, he sent columns of Wagnerites to Moscow. During the day, the Wagnerians passed through several places. They stopped 200 km from Moscow.