On the Kremlin Payroll: Dimitri Simes Earns Over $1 Million a Year from Russian State TV
Leaked government data shows the TV host kept earning millions even after his U.S. indictment
American political scientist Dimitri Simes has been earning over $1 million a year at Russia’s Channel One since 2025, according to Verstka. That is a 60% increase over 2023, when, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, he began asking the state-run channel for a raise due to the unfavorable ruble exchange rate.
The most recent financial details of Simes’s work for Channel One were disclosed in September 2024 by the U.S. Department of Justice, which filed criminal charges against the host for working for a sanctioned broadcaster. According to the indictment, his monthly salary up through July 2022 was $67,000, and starting in September, Channel One began paying Simes in rubles.
Over the past four years, Dimitri Simes earned about $3.5 million from Channel One
As Verstka discovered from leaked data from the Russian Social Fund, starting in September 2022, Simes began receiving a salary from Channel One as a Russian taxpayer, amounting to 5 million rubles per month. His salary remained at this level until the end of 2023, when, according to the U.S. Department of Justice, he requested a 20% raise because of the unfavorable ruble exchange rate.
The channel appears to have granted the request: by 2024, his annual ruble income at Channel One had risen 22%, from 61 million rubles to 74 million, the leaked documents show.
In 2025, Simes’s ruble pay rose another 31% — to 8 million rubles per month and 97 million rubles per year ($1.16 million at the exchange rate at the time), as revealed by Verstka. The annual figure most likely includes year-end bonuses: in the first half of 2026, his monthly pay averaged 6.6 million rubles (about $78,200).
Over nearly four years — from September 2022 to July 1, 2026 — Simes earned more than 291 million rubles at Channel One, or about $3.5 million, according to data analyzed by Verstka.
As a result, by early 2025, Simes had accumulated 61 million rubles in an account at T‑Bank, the Russian lender formerly known as Tinkoff.
Dimitri Simes moved to Russia six months after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine
Simes was born in the USSR in 1947 and emigrated to the United States in 1973, later becoming a U.S. citizen. He worked at American think tanks and universities and served for a long time as an adviser to former U.S. President Richard Nixon. Starting in 1994, he headed the Nixon Center, later renamed the Center for the National Interest. In 2018 he began hosting the talk show The Great Game on Channel One Russia.
Six months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Simes moved to Russia. That December he stepped down as director of the Center for the National Interest. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice charged him with violating U.S. sanctions and with money laundering over the funds he moved to the United States.
Verstka uncovered the details about Dimitri Simes’s income while working on the special project «On the Kremlin Payroll», an investigation into how much Russia’s leading propagandists earn. The special project is currently available in Russian only.
On the cover: Moderator Dimitri Simes during the plenary session of the 26th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Photo: Pavel Bednyakov/RIA Novosti/Kremlin Ru/Creative Commons
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