Hello everyone!
I hope you’ve missed our mini-series about propagandists as much as I have. Let me remind you that the stars of our previous episodes were Vladimir Solovyov (the video about his villa on Lake Como has already been watched by 6.6 million people) and the owner of the main news trash heap, LifeNews — the Parisian Aram Gabrelyanov.
But today it’s the turn of a far more refined gentleman. No on-air hysterics here, no talk of nuclear ash. Our hero today works for a different audience — people who are already sick of Solovyov’s shrieking on television.
That is exactly why Sergei Brilyov and his Saturday show about politics and the week’s events exist. But please, don’t let yourselves be fooled. Behind the facade of a seemingly decent and pleasant host is a malicious, hypocritical propagandist. Just like all the others. He lies on air, sings the praises of Putin and Putin’s Russia, collects his money from the state TV channel, and leaves that Putinist Russia on the next flight. To London — to his family, his apartment, and his queen.
For the past 17 years, Brilyov has worked as a host and writer for news and political programs. You may also remember him from Putin’s annual call-in shows during his first two presidential terms. Brilyov commentated all of Putin’s inaugurations, hosted every kind of forum, regularly interviews officials, and the number of foreign heads of state he has interviewed is astonishing — there are dozens of them. Bush, Obama, Sarkozy, Macron, Blair, Cameron, Xi Jinping. The list goes on and on.
Brilyov’s main propaganda weapon is the complete substitution of reality. A parallel Russia, full of promise and positive expectations. His secret is that there is ABSOLUTELY no bad news on his programs. On his show, there is only good news. In Brilyov’s Russia, officials are delightful people, governors are beloved by the public, and of course the source of all this light and warmth is Putin.
Let me give you a few examples. I strongly recommend watching our video — it includes many clips from Brilyov’s programs, and everything is very clear and obvious there.
Take the biggest issue of the past few months — raising the retirement age. He discusses it with MP Andrei Makarov, head of the State Duma Committee on Budget and Taxes. Well, “discusses” it... Naturally, not a word about the age itself. Only improvements, only growth, only a bright future.
And that was more or less the end of the discussion of this unprecedented robbery of Russians by their own government.
In this episode of Brilyov’s program, which aired two days after the law raising the retirement age was passed, pensions were discussed for less than three minutes. More time in that same episode was spent discussing a Nikolai Baskov concert at the Kremlin.
Sergei Brilyov did not notice the protests against the pension reform at all. Tens of thousands of people took to the streets in every major city across the country, while in Brilyov’s episode for that week, Tatyana Golikova (the AUTHOR of this pension reform) is painting a fence at a subbotnik (a volunteer community clean-up day).
Despite the crushing defeat of United Russia candidates in regional elections, including in Primorye, Brilyov, WHILE ACTUALLY IN VLADIVOSTOK AT THE TIME, speaks not with the candidates for governor, but with the president of Mongolia.
And remember that eventful week: a hole was discovered in the space station, the euro rose to 80 rubles, and there were reports of brutal torture in prison colonies? On his program, Sergei Brilyov spent 12 minutes congratulating oligarch Usmanov on his birthday.
One week in October. The events: Putin’s approval rating falls to a record low. Another GRU officer is identified in the scandalous Skripal case. Constitutional Court chairman Zorkin wants to rewrite the constitution. And there are utterly unprecedented protests in Ingushetia. Plenty to talk about on a weekly news roundup, right?
Let me quickly recap Brilyov’s episode from that week. First segment — Putin held a Security Council meeting. Second segment — Putin and Lukashenko eat draniki (potato pancakes) and blini in Belarus. Then they drink water from a spring. Third segment — Putin and Medvedev smell apples and discuss agriculture, which, you’ll never guess, has risen from its knees!
The flourishing of agriculture was discussed for six minutes. Another seven minutes were spent discussing Russia’s exit from the Council of Europe. Then another seven on the resignation of U.S. Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, including a very detailed look at her biography — many thanks for that. And squeezed in between the segments was the astonishing news that Russians can now travel to Suriname without a visa. Which, according to Brilyov, is a sensation.
During a long interview with Medvedev summing up six years of work, Brilyov does not ask him about palaces and does not even hint at the corruption allegations. Instead, he marvels at Dmitry Anatolyevich’s ability to remember lots of numbers.
Propagandist Sergei Brilyov simply replaces the real news agenda entirely and offers his own fake one instead. It’s a kind of journalistic shell game. A distraction.
But what I like most is how skillfully Brilyov handles “bad” news — meaning news that compromises Putin — when it is simply impossible not to mention it. He does mention it, but in a very peculiar way. The best illustration is the story of the Salisbury GRU agents.
In the week when the British first published photos of Petrov and Boshirov — unquestionably the biggest world news story at the time — Brilyov refused to discuss the subject on air, saying that “everyone has already discussed everything, and he doesn’t want to tire the viewer.”
The following week, after the famous interview and after BRILYOV HIMSELF asked Putin whether these were civilians, the host again decides the topic is not worth attention. With the wording: “Everything has already been said and retold, heard and seen again; we’ll wait for further developments.”
He returns to the subject two weeks later, when all the GRU agents have already been identified and their full biographies are known. The story has developed as far as it possibly can. And again Brilyov refuses to discuss it, because “if we start retelling all the versions that have been laid out, we’ll simply derail the program.”
And do you know what the author of the program offers us instead of the spy scandal? Here Brilyov outdid even himself.
Meghan Markle. Personally. Shut. The car. Door.
Bravo.
And it was in moments like these that we began to understand. Brilyov has simply mixed up the countries. Real life in our country is absent from his news because these are not really news about Russia at all, and Brilyov is not a Russian TV host. He just ended up in the studio by accident.
And once we realized that Sergei Brilyov had lost his way in this world, we started looking for his homeland.
His real homeland. A wealthy country with good infrastructure, high incomes, and decent pensions. In other words, exactly the kind of country Sergei is always talking about in his news broadcasts.
And Duchess Meghan Markle, whom this Putinist TV man loves to follow, gave us a clue about what to do.
We enter the surname “Brilyov” into the public UK companies database. There is only one match — a London company belonging to a certain Irina Brilyova. That is Sergei Brilyov’s wife. And right there on the same page, her place of residence is listed as the United Kingdom.
Then we simply google further and find that a certain Irina Brilyova signed a petition against budget cuts in the London Borough of Hounslow. How interesting.
Have you ever signed a petition about the Borough of Hounslow? Neither have I. But Irina Brilyova is interested in that issue. And just as we thought that, technically, anyone could sign such a petition, we found a photo of the Brilyovs in that very borough, geotagged in the Chiswick area.
Now let’s try our luck and google “Brilyova Chiswick.” And there it is. The third link. Irina Brilyova is a part-owner of the management company for an apartment building.
And here, not just some random link, but an official document: the full list of shareholders in the management company HEATHFIELD COURT (CHISWICK).
We found the Brilyovs’ specific apartment in London simply by going through all the apartments in the building managed by the company in which she owns a share. This is the building.
A nice-looking place, and the neighborhood is excellent — prosperous West London. The Thames is nearby, along with parks, and Heathrow Airport is not far away.
And here is the property record for the apartment.
The owner is Irina Aleksandrovna Brilyova. Purchase date: February 22, 2016. No doubt timed to Defender of the Fatherland Day (a Russian holiday on February 23). Price: £700,000. Or $1 million. Or 78 million rubles at the time of purchase.
The same record states that the apartment was bought without loans or a mortgage. That is an important point. Brilyov has never even pretended to be in business — unlike, for example, Vladimir Solovyov. He has worked only as a journalist. On state television. His wife is not in business either; she works for a family NGO, meaning she is involved in public-interest work. And yet they somehow had $1 million in cash available to buy an apartment in London.
But that’s not all.
Do you know what those hefty tomes in the picture are?
These unremarkable books are a source of priceless knowledge for us. They are lists of people eligible to vote in UK elections — voter rolls, similar to the ones you see at polling stations in Russia.
We open the right page — though now we open it easily, in reality it took several days of work to find it — and we see that back in 2001, a certain Sergei Brilyov and Irina Konstantinova (that is Brilyov’s wife’s maiden name) were registered as voters in the Notting Hill area.
And so we find the true homeland of state TV propagandist Sergei Borisovich Brilyov. Congratulations. The man who has spent 17 years sitting next to Putin, hosting his annual call-in shows, and telling us every week how wonderful life is in Putin’s Russia is officially a subject of Her Majesty the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Just to be safe, let’s make sure you cannot end up on such a list by accident.
Under British law, the electoral register may include:
That’s all. Under no circumstances can a person with only a Russian passport appear there.
Now it is clear why Brilyov was so shocked that Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex, closed the car door herself. She is his duchess, after all. This is news about his royal family.
We also established how Brilyov got his citizenship. He lived in London for about six years, from 1995 to 2001. He headed the London bureau of the same Vesti news program. He received his salary and travel allowances from the Russian state budget, lived in Notting Hill, and eventually earned himself a passport.
Back then, in 2001, the Vesti special correspondent may have had a passport, but he did not have the money to buy property in London. Now everything has changed. Fifteen years of praising Putin on federal television have paid off quite well. Now Brilyov has both citizenship and a “spare” $1 million for an apartment in Chiswick.
Wonderful. A true Putin patriot! A model one.
A responsible voter in Britain. In 2016, when Russia is in crisis, incomes are falling, and the population is getting poorer, he goes and buys himself another apartment there for $1 million. But every Saturday he comes to Russia to tell us how well people live here. That pensioners are not being robbed here — their pensions are being raised. That prices are not rising and salaries are not falling — on the contrary, life is getting better every day thanks to Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.
And Vladimir Vladimirovich himself must be pleased — he has an excellent liar and hypocrite on the payroll. Is he bothered that his annual call-in shows are hosted by a British subject? I doubt it. Putin’s entire system of power is built on lies, so why would he be upset by such a trifle? After all, the main thing Putin and his circle do is steal money in Russia and then move it abroad. So what does Brilyov do?
He lies to you from the screen. Gets paid for it. And then goes home to his queen and the affairs of the Borough of Hounslow.
I think those of you reading this post and watching my YouTube channel probably do not watch Sergei Brilyov’s program very often. But there are plenty who do. The consumers of this propaganda number in the millions, and you and I can make sure that every time Brilyov starts pushing his imaginary good news again, many people will not believe him and will instead say: shut up, sir. Share this video. Support the Anti-Corruption Foundation.