NTV (Cyrillic: НТВ) is a Russian free-to-air television channel that was launched as a subsidiary of Vladimir Gusinsky's company Media-Most [ru].

NTV[3] has no official meaning according to Igor Malashenko, the author of the name and co-founder of the company, but in the 1990s unofficial transcripts of the acronym include "New" (Novoje), "Independent" (Nezavisimoje), "Non-governmental" (Negosudarstvennoje), "Our" (Nashe).

[2] He attracted talented journalists and news anchors of the time such as Tatiana Mitkova, Leonid Parfyonov, Mikhail Osokin, Yevgeniy Kiselyov, Vladimir A. Kara-Murza, Victor Shenderovich and others.

The channel set high professional standards in Russian television, broadcasting live coverage and sharp analysis of current events.

On 8 February the newspaper Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti published a letter signed by the Rector of St. Petersburg State University Lyudmila Verbitskaya, the Dean of its Law Department Nikolay Kropachyov and some of Putin's other presidential campaign assistants that urged the prosecution of the authors of the show for what they considered a criminal offence.

[citation needed] On 24 March 2000, two days before the presidential elections, NTV featured the Ryazan apartment bombing of fall 1999 in the talk show Independent Investigation.

[10] Seven months later, NTV general manager Igor Malashenko said at the JFK School of Government that the Information Minister Mikhail Lesin had warned him on several occasions.

[11] According to Alexander Goldfarb, Malashenko told him that Valentin Yumashev had brought a warning from the Kremlin, one day before the airing of the show, promising in no uncertain terms that the NTV managers "should consider themselves finished" if they went ahead with the broadcast.

[13] Accordingly, in the following episode of the show, called "Ten Commandments", the puppet of Putin was replaced with a cloud covering the top of a mountain and a burning bush.

Доля свободы) agreement, Gusinsky would discharge his debts by selling Media-Most to Gazprom-Media, which had held a 30% share of NTV since 1996, for the price imposed by the latter, and was given a guarantee that he would not be prosecuted.

On 3 April, Gazprom Media headed by Alfred Kokh by violating the procedure conducted a shareholders' meeting which removed Kiselyov from the NTV Director General position.

Many leading journalists, including Yevgeniy Kiselyov, Svetlana Sorokina, Viktor Shenderovich, Vladimir A. Kara-Murza, Dmitry Dibrov, left the company.

Citizens concerned by the threat to the freedom of speech in Russia argued that the financial pressure was inspired by the Vladimir Putin's government, which was often subject to NTV's criticism.

As insiders claimed, Jordan was sacked because NTV had carried a live translation of the culmination of the Moscow theater siege in October 2002 and had been too critical of the way authorities handled it.

On 1 June 2004, Leonid Parfyonov, one of the last leading journalists from the old NTV staff who remained, and who was still critical of the government, was ousted from the channel, and his weekly news commentary programme Namedni was taken off the air.

In August 2014, NTV aired a documentary titled 13 Friends of the Junta, which described critics of Russia's policies in Ukraine as "traitors" and supporters of "fascists".

[28] The producers of the program, Pyotr Drogovoz and Liliya Parfyonova, were also accused of frequently receiving wiretap information from FSB which allowed them to pay surprise visits with camera on various opposition meetings.

[29] Shortly after the Crocus City Hall attack, for which the Islamic State – Khorasan Province claimed responsibility, NTV broadcast a doctored video using audio deepfaking, purporting to show Oleksiy Danilov, the Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, confirming Ukrainian involvement in the attack, supposedly saying, "It's fun in Moscow today, I think it's very fun.

[30][32] In 2022, the Denis Diderot Committee, a European group of academic researchers and professionals called for sanctions against NTV Plus for having cancelled various international news channels from its line-up.