On 8 April 2026 it became known that Alexander Malkevich, a deputy of the Legislative Assembly of St Petersburg, made a film about the churches of the Kherson region. The same day, Alexander Seravin, head of the executive committee of the St Petersburg branch of United Russia, said that Alexander Malkevich would most likely not be in the new convocation of the city parliament: he would “take on another important party assignment”, even though his party membership had been suspended back in October 2025 because of the criminal case in which he is now a defendant.
From Prigozhin’s mercenary to Prigozhin’s betrayer
On 23–24 June 2023 the whole country followed the march of the rebellious Wagner PMC corps on the capital. The company’s owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, claimed that the Russian military had struck the PMC in the rear and announced a “march of justice” to stop “the evil that Russia’s military leadership is spreading”. Prigozhin’s forces seized Rostov-on-Don, including the headquarters building of the Southern Military District, and from there moved on Moscow, stopping just 200 km short. After the mutiny ended, Prigozhin left for Belarus, and on 23 August he died in a plane crash.
But between those two dates Prigozhin could watch as one of the media managers closely tied to him, Alexander Malkevich, who ran the “St Petersburg” TV channel, quickly switched to the side of his enemies and began actively working to discredit his former boss. For this, in September 2023 he received the post of adviser to the governor of St Petersburg, Alexander Beglov (Prigozhin was in a bitter conflict with Beglov), and a year later — also a seat as a city deputy.
Malkevich worked for Prigozhin for a long time and with enthusiasm. In 2018 he became editor-in-chief of the news agency USA Really, a subsidiary of the Federal News Agency (FAN). That same year he was detained by the FBI on charges of interfering in the US presidential election held two years earlier and was expelled from the country. In addition, Malkevich is on the US Treasury Department’s sanctions list for “attempts to influence the 2020 US presidential election, as well as other acts of disinformation and interference”. In July 2019 two employees of Malkevich’s foundation — political technologists Maxim Shugaley and Samer Sueifan, who presented themselves as sociologists — were arrested in Libya on suspicion of attempting to influence the country’s upcoming presidential election.
After the start of the special military operation, with financial support from Yevgeny Prigozhin, Malkevich created three regional TV channels in the “new territories”: “Za TV” in Melitopol, “Mariupol 24” in Donetsk Oblast and “Tavria 24” in Kherson. When Prigozhin died, Malkevich left, probably with the remainder of the money Prigozhin had allocated for media projects in Ukraine.
In July 2024 Ilya Gorbunov, a former top manager of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Patriot media group, was arrested for extorting 4 million roubles from Alexander Malkevich. He was later sentenced to 10 years in a strict-regime colony with a fine of 500,000 roubles. One former employee of the Patriot group believes there was no extortion: Malkevich received at least 50 million roubles from Prigozhin for media projects in Ukraine and did not return the money that remained after Prigozhin’s death and the freezing of the projects. He allegedly used this money to get elected to the Legislative Assembly. Gorbunov believed that legally this was Patriot’s money and demanded its return.
Denigrating Russian civil society
Malkevich and Prigozhin did not forget about Russian elections either. It was the future mutineer’s media holding, with Malkevich’s direct involvement, that provided the information support for provocations during the nationwide vote on constitutional amendments, trying to discredit independent observers and experts who criticised the conduct of the vote. This tactic had been used for several years before that, but it was Malkevich who first became its face, and for the first time these provocations were covered on the main evening news broadcast on Channel One.
By that point he had already been for several years (since 2017) a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation, chairman of the Commission for the Development of the Information Community, Mass Media and Mass Communications, head of the Working Group of the Russian Civic Chamber on Countering the Spread of False Information, Public Oversight and Internet Security, and he also sat on the Public Council of the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation.
The criminal case
Six months after the Russian Constitution was amended, in January 2021, Malkevich was appointed general director of JSC “City Agency for Television and Radio Broadcasting” (the “St Petersburg” TV channel — a mandatory publicly accessible regional TV channel of a constituent entity of the Russian Federation).
In April 2024 a criminal case was opened on the facts of especially large-scale fraud (Article 159, Part 4 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), in which Alexander Malkevich is now a defendant. It concerns the embezzlement of about 37 million roubles allocated from the city budget to the “St Petersburg” TV channel for information and media support of the city administration’s activities on the internet. According to the investigation, in 2020–2021 the TV channel concluded a contract with the “New Media” foundation of blogger Nikolai Kamnev. During the inquiry the Investigative Committee of Russia concluded that the foundation did not perform the work and submitted fictitious reporting documents for payment, on the basis of which it received payment in full. Subsequently, according to the investigation, the money paid was transferred to the accounts of organisations and entrepreneurs controlled by participants in the scheme and later cashed out.
Alexander Malkevich and the former general director of the TV channel, Boris Petrov, initially passed through the case as witnesses, but on 10 October 2025 the case was reclassified as especially large-scale embezzlement (Article 160, Part 4 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation), and Malkevich and Petrov’s status was changed to that of defendants.
That day the deputy director for economics and finance of the “St Petersburg” TV channel, Sergei Syrov, the special representative of the governor of St Petersburg and head of the St Petersburg Regional Management Centre, Elena Nikitina, and Nikolai Kamnev were detained and transferred to Moscow. They were later sent to a Moscow pre-trial detention centre. Elena Nikitina’s husband — Sergei Kozhokar, president of the ANO “Family and Childhood Culture Foundation”, who, like his wife, is charged not only with embezzlement but also with money laundering (Article 174 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) — received house arrest. Alexander Malkevich and Boris Petrov were subjected only to a ban on certain actions — they are forbidden to communicate with other figures in the case and with witnesses, and also to visit the office of the television and radio broadcasting agency.
The case is expected to be handed over to the court shortly.