A leading Putin propagandist has become the latest mysterious high-profile death in Russia.
Kirill Vyshinsky, the executive director of the Russia Today state media conglomerate and a former collaborator with Putin in Ukraine, passed away in Moscow today at 58.
In 2018, as a then Ukrainian citizen, he was detained in Kyiv on charges of high treason for working for Russian propaganda.
He spent about a year in a detention centre before being handed over to Moscow as part of a prisoner exchange in 2019.
Russian state media outlets today said Vyshinsky had died after a ‘lengthy’ or ‘serious’ illness.
Despite his passing, Vyshinsky had been active in the media, making frequent radio appearances over the summer, while holding the position of executive director at the Russian Today (RT) propaganda entity, with no prior reports of his illness.
Vyshinsky headed the Putin propaganda outlet RIA Novosti news agency starting in 2014, according to the Chesno civic movement.
In the same year, he was honored with a Russian state award ‘For the Return of Crimea’ along with the Order ‘For Merit to the Fatherland,’ subsequently acquiring Russian citizenship.
Kirill Vyshinsky (pictured), executive director of the Russia Today state media conglomerate and a former collaborator with Putin in Ukraine, passed away in Moscow today at 58.
In 2018, as a Ukrainian citizen, Vyshinsky was arrested in Kyiv accused of high treason for working on behalf of Russian propaganda. Pictured: Putin making a speech during a meeting with nuclear industry specialists on August 22, 2025.
He spent close to a year in custody before being transferred to Moscow as part of a 2019 prisoner exchange. Pictured: Vyshinsky, who died in Moscow at 58, seen in 2019 after being released in a prisoner swap by Ukraine.
In 2018, Ukraine’s SBU Security Service detained Vyshinsky after charging him with encroaching on Ukraine’s territorial integrity and state treason.
But, in 2019, he was transferred to Russia as part of a ’35 for 35′ prisoner exchange and became the Russian Today director later that year.
In 2022 he supported Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, describing the goal as ‘demilitarisation and denazification’.
He was on Putin’s so-called ‘human rights council’ and publicly represented the tyrant in the last presidential election.
In June this year Ukraine’s Supreme Anti-Corruption Court granted the Justice Ministry’s claim to seize over £200,000 of Vyshinsky’s assets.
Chief of RT Margarita Simonyan described him as a ‘courageous man who served time for his values – for our values – in a Ukrainian prison, unbroken, strong.
‘He was stoically ill.’
His is the latest in dozens of mysterious deaths of leading figures in Russia since shortly before the start of the war against Ukraine.
There are notable cases of prominent Russians plunging from windows or balconies.
Vyshinsky was on Putin’s so-called ‘human rights council’ and publicly represented the tyrant in the last presidential election
In 2022 he supported Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, describing the goal as ‘demilitarisation and denazification’
In July, Transneft vice-president Andrey Badalov, 62, fell to his death from the elite tower block where he lived on Moscow’s Rublevskoye Highway.
He reportedly lived on the building’s 10th floor but fell from the 17th storey, according to local media.
A source said the ‘preliminary cause’ of death is ‘suicide’, as investigators reportedly discovered a note Badalov had left to his wife.
In 2022, Ravil Maganov, chairman of Lukoil, Russia’s second-largest oil company, died when he plunged from a sixth floor window at Moscow’s elite Central Clinical Hospital, also known as the Kremlin Clinic.
Russian state media quickly said his death was a suicide but law enforcement sources said there was no suicide note and there were no CCTV cameras on the section of the building where Maganov fell.
On the same morning, Putin – who had earlier decorated Maganov, 67, with a top honour – swept into the hospital to pay his final respects to Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, who had died the same week.
In 2023, leading war official Marina Yankina, 58, head of the financial support department of the Russian Defence Ministry’s Western Military District, was found dead after falling 160ft from a 16th-floor window in St. Petersburg.
The circumstances surrounding her death remain unclear.
Former oil company vice president Mikhail Rogachev, 64, died after falling 110ft from his tenth-floor apartment in Moscow in October 2024.
He had been a senior executive at Yukos, an oil company dismembered by Putin and his cronies.
Rogachev was found at the entrance to his building by an employee of Russia ‘s SVR foreign intelligence agency and with injuries characteristic of a plunge, local media said.
TV channels reported that he lived on the tenth floor and that it was a suicide, claiming he had cancer and left a note – which police are now investigating.
But these reports were vehemently denied by his close friends and relatives.
