Pressure of Truth
Exposing the spin on all sides of the news.
Outlet profile

Pravda / RT-aligned network

pro-Kremlin, Russian state-linked

Owned byLinked to TigerWeb, a Crimea-based IT company founded by Yevgeny Shevchenko; Shevchenko was named NewsGuard's 2025 Disinformer of the Year. The network has documented ties to Russian-occupied Crimea's state infrastructure (Shevchenko previously worked for the state-owned firm Krymtekhnologii).
FundingOpaque; no advertising or subscription model is publicly disclosed. Funding is assessed by researchers as state-adjacent, with strong operational links to Russian state and Kremlin-backed entities. The network does not publish ownership or financial disclosures.
On the administrationmixed

Background

The Pravda Network traces its roots to 2011, when Crimea-based operator Yevgeny Shevchenko launched a regional news aggregator. After Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, the first Pravda-branded portals appeared on shared IP infrastructure belonging to Shevchenko's firm TigerWeb. The network expanded sharply after 2022 with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, eventually growing to at least 193 websites targeting more than 80 countries and publishing over 3.7 million articles. The French disinformation watchdog Viginum and the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab publicly identified and documented the network in 2023–2024 under the name Portal Kombat. Rather than creating original reporting, the network copy-pastes and auto-translates content from Russian state outlets (TASS, RIA Novosti, RT, Lenta) and Kremlin-aligned Telegram channels, with over 75 percent of content sourced from Telegram. News-pravda.com is the third-largest individual portal in the network by volume, having published roughly 258,000 articles. Researchers at DFRLab and GLOBSEC found in 2025–2026 that the network has deliberately seeded its content into Common Crawl archives and Wikipedia to corrupt AI training datasets — with generative AI tools repeating Pravda's false narratives roughly 33 percent of the time in NewsGuard audits. Media Bias/Fact Check rates the Pravda Network as far-right biased with very low factual reporting.

Sources

  1. Pravda network – Wikipedia
  2. Russia's so-called 'Pravda' network expands worldwide – DFRLab
  3. Russia's Pravda network in numbers: Introducing the Pravda Dashboard – DFRLab
  4. Russia-linked Pravda network cited on Wikipedia, LLMs, and X – DFRLab
  5. Pravda in the pipeline: Early evidence of state-adjacent propaganda in AI training data – DFRLab
  6. Global Offensive: Mapping the Sources Behind the Pravda Network – GLOBSEC
  7. Exposing Pravda: How pro-Kremlin forces are poisoning AI models and rewriting Wikipedia – Atlantic Council
  8. NewsGuard's 2025 Disinformer of the Year: Yevgeny Shevchenko – NewsGuard Reality Check
  9. Russia's Pravda Network: AI-Driven Disinformation on a Global Scale – BISI
  10. Pravda Network – Bias and Credibility – Media Bias/Fact Check

Profile compiled 2026-07-21; refreshed when ownership, funding, or the administration changes.

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