On Russian TV ahead of the Presidential election, there’s only one program: Putin’s

London: Thousands of Russians braved the cold for hours earlier this month to honour the opposition politician Alexei Navalny after his funeral. They chanted anti-war slogans and covered his gravesite with so many flowers that it disappeared from view.

It was one of the largest displays of defiance against President Vladimir Putin since he invaded Ukraine, and happened just weeks before an election he is all but assured to win. But Russians watching television saw none of it.

A leading state television channel opened with its host railing against the West and NATO. Another channel led with a segment extolling the virtues of domestically built streetcars. And there was the usual deferential coverage of Putin.

Since coming to power almost 25 years ago, Putin has eliminated nearly all independent media and opposition voices in Russia a process he ramped up after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The Kremlin’s control over media is now absolute.

State television channels cheer every battlefield victory, twist the pain of economic sanctions into positive stories, and ignore that tens of thousands of Russian soldiers have died in Ukraine.

Some Russians seek news from abroad or on social media using tools to circumvent state restrictions. But most still rely on state television, which floods them with the Kremlin’s view of the world. Over time, the effect is to whittle away their desire to question it.

“Propaganda is a kind of drug and I don’t mind taking it,” said Victoria, 50, from Russian-occupied Crimea. She refused to give her last name because of concerns about her safety.

“If I get up in the morning and hear that things are going badly in our country, how will I feel? How will millions of people feel? Propaganda is needed to sustain people’s spirit,” she said.

When Putin first addressed Russians as their new president on the last day of 1999, he promised a bright path after the chaotic years that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse.

“The state will stand firm to protect freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of mass media,” he said. Yet just over a year later, he broke that promise: The Kremlin neutered its main media critic, the independent TV channel NTV, and went after the media tycoons who controlled it.

In the following decades, multiple Russian journalists, including investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, were killed or jailed, and the Russian parliament passed laws curbing press freedoms. The crackdown intensified two years ago after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. New laws made it a crime to discredit the Russian military, and anyone spreading “false information” about the war faced up to 15 years in prison. Almost overnight, nearly all independent media outlets suspended operations or left the country. The Kremlin blocked access to independent media and some social media sites, and Russian courts jailed two journalists with U.S. citizenship, Evan Gershkovich and Alsu Kurmasheva.

“The Putin regime is based on propaganda and fear. And propaganda plays the most important role because people live in an information bubble,” said Marina Ovsyannikova, a former state television journalist who quit her job at a leading Russian state television channel in an on-air protest against the war.