Russia Ukraine Monitoring Desk Islamabad
RT India was launched in New Delhi in December 2025, in the presence of Russian President Vladimir Putin and Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of the Rossiya Segodnya media group and the Russian state channel RT (formerly Russia Today). Nearly six months later, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) is voicing concern over the channel’s expansion in India and the risk of disinformation being spread in the country’s information space.
Vladimir Putin called the inauguration of RT India a “momentous event” that “grants millions of Indian citizens clearer, more direct access to insights about contemporary Russia – our realities, aspirations, and perspectives.” Launched with the slogan “A new voice from an old friend,” RT India made its debut with an advertising campaign across the country’s main cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru. During his state visit to New Delhi in December 2025, Russian President Vladimir Putin personally attended the opening ceremony for this new branch of the state media RT dedicated to Indian audiences.
RT India, which has recruited around 100 employees and has a studio in Noida (a city bordering the capital city of Delhi), broadcasts daily news bulletins and topical programs. It is accessible online, as well as via cable and satellite. The outlet claims to offer an “alternative narrative” to what the channel’s CEO, Ashok Bagaria, described in an article of the online media outlet Newslaundry as the “one-sided narrative being presented by Western media outlets.” The channel’s launch comes amid a strategic rapprochement between Russia and India.
RT was welcomed with great fanfare in India, despite being hit with sanctions in several countries since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The channel has been banned from broadcasting in the European Union (EU) and is listed among the propaganda outlets sanctioned by a unanimous decision of the Council of the EU on 2 March 2022. The outlet was described as an entity “under the permanent direct or indirect control of the authorities of the Russian Federation (…) instrumental in bringing forward and supporting the military aggression against Ukraine.” RT was also stripped of its broadcasting license in the United Kingdom and forced to cease operations in the United States.
Célia Mercier, Head of RSF’s South Asia desk says ;
“The launch of RT India is part of a broader strategy to expand the Russian propaganda apparatus under the guise of international media. Presented as a news channel, RT is in reality an instrument serving the Kremlin, designed to disseminate a narrative aligned with Russian geopolitical interests. The launch of RT in India carries the risk of it becoming a conduit for foreign influence in public debate.”
When asked by RSF about the impact of RT’s launch in India, Precious Chatterje-Doody – a senior lecturer at the Open University in the UK and co-author of the 2024 book Russia, Disinformation, and the Liberal Order – analyses the situation as follows:
“What we know is that RT is skilled at exploiting public debates. It inserts itself into pre-existing social controversies rather than trying to create new ones. It can therefore be seen as attempting to amplify trends that are already present in India, such as discussions about inequalities in the international system, and to steer them in a direction favourable to Russian foreign policy. A great deal of previous research has taught us that RT is very likely to present issues crucial to Russian foreign policy in a misleading way. The most obvious example is the war against Ukraine. In practice this means historical revisionism about the origins of the conflict, false claims etc.”
Consequently, according to RSF observations, RT India systematically portrays the United States and Ukraine as “destabilising forces.” Anti-American angles are framed within the narrative of India’s “rise to power,” where relations between New Delhi and Moscow are presented as “essential.”
It is hardly surprising that a special program on the Donbas,a region in eastern Ukraine partially occupied by Russia, was broadcast on the channel in March. The segment included an interview with a contributor from International Reporters, an online platform funded by Moscow’s influence networks that hijacks journalistic conventions to spread Russian disinformation.
