The Wall Street Journal
By Ann M. Simmons and Thomas Grove
Sept. 6, 2024
Since arriving at the Kremlin, Sergei Kiriyenko’s job has been to make sure the Russian people see only what Vladimir Putin wants them to see. Now U.S. prosecutors say he is trying to do the same for Americans.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Justice Department named Kiriyenko as the curator of some 30 internet domains that were being used by the Russian government to spread false information. The domains appeared to be U.S. news sites but were, in fact, filled with Russian propaganda intended to erode international support for Ukraine and manipulate American voters ahead of the November presidential election, U.S. officials said. Russia denied any wrongdoing.
Kiriyenko, a veteran technocrat and one of President Putin’s most trusted lieutenants, has seen his portfolio expand in recent years, tasked with everything from organizing disputed elections to leading the Kremlin’s propaganda efforts on the war in Ukraine and overseeing Russia’s occupied territories there.
“He is the perfect technocrat in the worst sense,” said Alexander Gabuev, director of Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center in Berlin, who added that the U.S. allegations serve as a further indication his star is on the rise.
“If there are marching orders to kill freedom of expression, he will do that in the most efficient way possible,” he said.
A few months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Kiriyenko sought to rally public-relations officials from government bodies and ministries for a fight on the home front, telling them that “the main war that is taking place right now is the war over people’s minds,” according to an audio recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “All of us in this room are the special forces fighting this war,” he added.
Once regarded as a supporter of Western-oriented ideas, Kiriyenko has used increasingly nationalistic rhetoric. In recent years, he has railed about the importance of indoctrinating schoolchildren against the West by educating Russian youth in a patriotic way and promoting military service among schoolchildren.
“Today, patriotic education is coming to the forefront,” Kiriyenko told an educational session for future instructors at centers for military-sports training and the patriotic education of youth that Putin established in May 2023. “The key challenge for the country is what we will pass on to the future generation, what they will believe in,” he said.
Kiriyenko was appointed prime minister under Boris Yeltsin in 1998 at the age of 35—the youngest ever to hold the position in post-Soviet Russia, earning him the nickname “Kinder Surprise.”
That year, Kiriyenko introduced Putin when he was appointed as head of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, Russia’s principal security service.
“The choice of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is not coincidental,” Kiriyenko said at the ceremony. “He is a professional across the spectrum of problems that are now facing the Federal Security Service.”
As prime minister, the goal was for him to breathe new life into Russia’s flailing economy and turbocharge Yeltsin’s efforts to overhaul the Soviet system. But Kiriyenko was handed the reins of government when Moscow could no longer pay its debts to foreign creditors. The country fell into a financial crisis, and he was fired within five months of taking the role.
Still, Putin saw in Kiriyenko a capable—and most important—loyal protégé whom he could mold, Kremlin watchers said. When he became president in 2000, Putin appointed Kiriyenko as his envoy to the Volga region, which hosts the Russian Federal Nuclear Center. Five years later, Kiriyenko was tapped to head Russia’s state atomic-energy company, Rosatom.
Kiriyenko entered the presidential administration after years of mass protests that started in 2011, as Moscow sought greater control over Russians’ personal freedoms. The Kremlin had become convinced that sites such as Facebook and Twitter were essentially arms of the U.S. government trying to foment revolution abroad. Kiriyenko was put in charge of reining in speech online.
As he took charge, Kiriyenko sought to clamp down on online messaging in the same way Russia had controlled traditional media. A succession of laws were passed that did everything from increasing fines for antigovernment posts to pushing internet traffic entering the country through state-controlled filtering stations.
Kiriyenko’s office was in charge of keeping tabs on Russian tech companies such as VK, Russia’s version of Facebook, as well as monitoring the companies’ willingness to give into officials’ demands.
As Russia clamped down, the number of requests seeking data from Russian tech grew exponentially, said a person who worked at a tech company. The person said Russia’s security agencies often reached out informally and sometimes Kiriyenko would contact the companies directly.
“He would speak softly, respectably, but you knew what kind of power he held,” said the person, who met with Kiriyenko on several occasions.
The U.S. sanctioned Kiriyenko in 2022 for his role in establishing Russian governance in Ukrainian territories that Moscow had illegally occupied.
Kiriyenko’s political star has continued to rise and some Kremlin observers have pegged him as a possible successor to Putin.
Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an exiled Russian dissident and former oil magnate, pointed out in a video posted on YouTube in July 2022 that Kiriyenko had begun to appear much more often in the press and on television. He was giving speeches on military topics, visiting the front, opening monuments.
“This is clearly a bid for the status of Putin’s successor,” Khodorkovsky said. “And Putin seems to be reacting quite positively, since it was Kiriyenko who was assigned to become the curator of the annexed Ukrainian territories.”
Nonetheless, Putin doesn’t appear to have plans to leave the stage soon. He won re-election in March after overseeing changes to the country’s constitution in 2020 that allow him to potentially remain in office until 2036.
Benoit Faucon contributed to this article.
Write to Ann M. Simmons at ann.simmons@wsj.com and Thomas Grove at thomas.grove@wsj.com