The Kremlin’s “Workshop” media programme has trained more than 1,700 people from 16 countries, building an organised pipeline that reaches from Moscow into occupied Ukraine and foreign audiences abroad.
The Personnel Pipeline
Sergei Kiriyenko, deputy chief of staff in Putin’s administration, initiated the programme in 2021. Novaya Gazeta Europe reports that it trains bloggers, media managers and people who organise information campaigns. Vladimir Solovyov and Margarita Simonyan are among the figures involved in training. The programme’s head has described Russia’s president as the “primary client” for its work.
This course teaches how to appear on television. Trainees are offered grants and routes into pro-government media. Graduates of related projects have been sent for internships at TASS, Mash and Komsomolskaya Pravda. The organisers say graduates won around 100 grant competitions in the programme’s first two years.
The Occupied Territories
A media camp near Mariupol and a media centre in the city form one system, and occupation authorities are cultivating people to produce the next round of messaging by controlling what residents can read and watch. The network includes 123 graduates from occupied Ukraine.
The network can also move together when the Kremlin needs it. Co-founder Yulia Ablets said participants received talking points during Prigozhin’s mutiny, then circulated them through their own channels, adapting the message for different audiences.
A central line can arrive looking like many independent voices.
The Foreign Audience
Graduates Christelle Neant and Victoria Smorodina founded International Reporters; Andrea Lucidi took charge of its Italian-language desk. The agency has denied that a Russian airstrike hit Mariupol’s maternity hospital. The programme therefore has a role beyond domestic state media and occupied Ukraine: it develops messengers who can carry Kremlin narratives to audiences abroad.
In 2024–2025, “Maisternia” received about 121 million rubles in earmarked contributions, without disclosing the donors or specific spending. The people, placements and money make this an organised propaganda pipeline, not a collection of commentators who happened to reach the same view.