Kommersant: The FT-Equivalent Russian Daily
How to read Kommersant — Russia's elite business daily — for foreign-policy signaling, ownership context, and the analytical conventions of its diplomatic desk.
Origins and Editorial Identity
Kommersant (Коммерсантъ — the hard sign restoring the pre-1918 orthography) was founded in 1989 by Vladimir Yakovlev as one of the first independent business newspapers of the late Soviet period. Its name and typography deliberately invoked the 1909–1917 merchant daily of the same title, signaling a return to pre-revolutionary commercial journalism. Since 2006 the paper has been owned by Alisher Usmanov, the metals-and-telecoms billionaire sanctioned by the EU (28 February 2022), the UK (3 March 2022), and the US Treasury OFAC (3 March 2022) following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Ownership matters: Kommersant operates within the bounds of permissible elite discourse, but it is read precisely because it reflects the views of business and government insiders rather than the mass-market line of Rossiyskaya Gazeta or the combative posture of RT.
Functionally, Kommersant is the closest Russian analogue to the Financial Times or Handelsblatt — a salmon-paper daily of record for the corporate and bureaucratic classes. Its weekday print run (around 75,000–90,000) understates its influence; the paper is required reading in ministries, state banks (Sberbank, VTB, VEB.RF), and the major federal agencies. The companion weekly Kommersant-Vlast (suspended in 2017) and Kommersant-Dengi historically extended the brand into long-form political and financial analysis.
The Diplomatic Desk
For foreign-policy readers, the indispensable section is Mir (Мир, "World"), led for over two decades by correspondents who travel with the president and foreign minister. Andrei Kolesnikov — not to be confused with the Carnegie analyst of the same name — has covered the Kremlin pool since 2001 and writes the signature column Pryamaya Rech (Прямая речь, "Direct Speech"), a stylized first-person account of Putin's public engagements. Kolesnikov's pieces are formally feuilletons but contain verbatim exchanges and atmospheric detail unavailable in the official Kremlin.ru transcripts, which are sanitized of asides and crowd reactions.
Elena Chernenko, the paper's diplomatic correspondent since the late 2000s, is the single most important byline for MID-watching. She breaks stories on arms-control positions, sanctions responses, and bilateral negotiations — often citing "a source in the foreign ministry" or "a Russian diplomat familiar with the consultations." Chernenko's January 2022 reporting on the Russian draft treaties presented to the US and NATO on 17 December 2021 included details on Moscow's red lines that preceded official MID briefings by 24–48 hours. She was briefly removed from the Kremlin pool in February 2022 after circulating an open letter against the war but continues to publish.
Maxim Yusin, deputy head of the foreign desk, writes the regular column on Middle East and post-Soviet affairs. Vladimir Solovyov (the journalist, distinct from the television propagandist) covers the CIS and has been the paper's lead voice on Armenia-Azerbaijan, Moldova, and Central Asia files.
How Kommersant Differs from TASS and RIA
Where TASS and RIA Novosti reproduce ministry statements with minimal editorial framing, Kommersant adds analytical scaffolding: identification of the bureaucratic author of a decision, the inter-agency disputes preceding it, and the likely foreign reaction. The paper routinely cites named experts from IMEMO, the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (SVOP), and the Valdai Club, providing a map of the permissible expert ecosystem. Critically, Kommersant publishes corrections and occasionally prints government denials of its scoops — a procedural feature absent from purely state outlets and a useful signal of which stories struck a nerve.