On April 13, Ksenia Sobchak released an interview with TV host Anton Krasovsky, a figure known for moving from liberal circles into Russia’s conservative camp. Once a recognizable journalist at glossy magazines, he became an aggressive war propagandist and was fired from the Russian state propaganda outlet RT for calling for Ukrainian children to be “drowned” and “burned.” Krasovsky is openly gay and founded a foundation to help people living with HIV. He now supports the ban on LGBTQ+ expression in Russia.
Krasovsky is 50 years old. He was born in the Moscow region and spent four years of his adolescence in Ukraine, where his father worked at the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant.
In the mid-1990s, Krasovsky became a correspondent for the program “Book News” on the Russian television channel NTV, and in the 2000s hosted the talk show “NTVshniki.” He also worked with glossy publications — Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and GQ.
In the 2010s, Krasovsky twice headed the campaign headquarters of Russian presidential candidates: in 2011 for businessman Mikhail Prokhorov, and in 2018 for journalist Ksenia Sobchak. That same year, Krasovsky ran for mayor of Moscow but was denied registration.
Krasovsky is an openly gay man who is HIV-positive. In 2016, he founded the AIDS.Center foundation to help people living with HIV, and currently serves as its president.
From 2019, Krasovsky worked with the state propaganda outlet RT. In 2020, he became head of RT’s Russian-language broadcasting directorate, and in 2022 he backed Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
Later that year, Krasovsky was fired from RT after calling on air for children in Ukraine to be “drowned” and “burned.” Russia’s Investigative Committee conducted a preliminary inquiry into the remarks but did not open a criminal case.
Krasovsky later launched the media outlet Konservator together with Z-propagandist Yegor Kholmogorov. He is under Western sanctions for supporting Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
In 2022, 15 of Krasovsky’s acquaintances told Meduza that he had used drugs. Nikolai Lunchenkov, a former infectious disease physician at AIDS.Center, believed Krasovsky had a drug addiction.
During the interview, Sobchak suspected Krasovsky was drunk — he denied it. She warned him she would not allow him to drink during their conversation.
Sobchak filmed part of the interview at Krasovsky’s apartment, with icons and a portrait of Vladimir Putin in the background, and part of it in a police transport van as they drove around central Moscow. They discussed their shared past — Sobchak and Krasovsky have known each other for many years — his firing from RT, his views on the war, and his feelings toward former friends who oppose it. Here are the most striking quotes from Krasovsky:
Krasovsky’s statements, combined with his speech and behavior during the interview, raised suspicions that he was in an unstable emotional state. That was the subject of the most-liked comments under Sobchak’s video. “Judging by her recent interviews, Ksenia is writing a dissertation in psychiatry,” read one comment that received more than 5,000 likes.
The interview also drew significant reaction on Facebook. Among the most notable responses was a post by journalist and LGBTQ+ activist Renat Davletgildeev, who opposes the war. Davletgildeev had previously said that he and Krasovsky had been close but stopped communicating because of Krasovsky’s “transformation.” In the Sobchak interview, Krasovsky mentioned Davletgildeev as one of the people he misses.
In his post, Davletgildeev said he misses Krasovsky too, and thanked him: “I think I rarely said thank you to you. But I will never forget how you pulled me out of the worst situations. And how you saved my life — I won’t forget that either. […] We’re on opposite sides of the barricades, of course. But who the fuck am I if I pretend those years never happened? […] And this — understand me correctly right now. If I happen to outlive you — I will of course fly to your funeral. And I’ll bring flowers to that oak tree overlooking the river. And I know that if I go first, you’ll come to mine. And to my tree. And we’ll definitely talk about everything else someday.”
Journalist Andrei Loshak, who joined the comments, condemned the post. “The funeral talk is beautiful, of course, but you won’t go anywhere if, God forbid, something happens. You’d get arrested there — you wouldn’t even make it out of the airport. And Krasovsky will never see a Schengen visa for the rest of his life. That life is gone and can never come back. And your friend Krasovsky is one of those who destroyed it with his own hands, building a hell in its place where he now suffers himself,” wrote Loshak.
Some commenters pushed back on Loshak. “Krasovsky, seriously, personally helped me with very difficult charitable matters when I was working for [Mikhail] Prokhorov, and found someone who helped a badly injured boy in a very significant way. Am I supposed to forget that and throw mud at him?! I have no illusions about him and never did — we haven’t spoken or seen each other in a long time — but I won’t hide the fact that he helped and never asked for any public recognition in return. And Rinat [Davletgildeev], I’ll say again, wrote about what he feels. At the very least, his memory and personal feelings deserve a calmer response,” replied journalist Arina Borodina.
The broader online debate over the Krasovsky interview kept returning to the same question: does he deserve sympathy? Writer Viktor Shenderovich, literary critic Anna Narinskaya, playwright Mikhail Durnenkov, media manager Sergei Nikolaevich, and actor Maxim Vitorgan, Sobchak’s ex-husband, all weighed in.
So did Sobchak’s current husband, director Konstantin Bogomolov, who in recent years has taken a pro-Kremlin stance, criticizing the West and calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine “a stroke of luck for the generation” and “a heroic story.” Bogomolov used the discussion around Krasovsky as an occasion to criticize the “Russian liberal intelligentsia.”
“Krasovsky, sometimes striking a false note, sometimes preening a little too much, plays a Marmeladov melody. And they listen, spellbound. They condemn, they recoil, they spit — they even sympathize, even forgive — but the main thing is they listen, they listen to those notes of decay, repentance, pride, humiliation, self-flagellation, and tears so dear to every Russian intellectual. […] How pleasant it is to confirm that ‘we are not him.’ To toss out a contemptuous ‘wretch!’ Or to toss a coin in the form of a couple of sympathetic lines. The Russian liberal intellectual has no other rallying point left. This is the pinnacle of his strength, courage, moral purity, and civic stance. Rats. And Ksenia’s work is wonderful,” wrote Bogomolov.
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