[1][2][3] Sergey Brilyov was born on 24 July 1972 in Havana, Cuba, where his father worked as an interpreter for Soviet civil aircraft exporters.

He became the first correspondent to visit Cuba after a ban was imposed on The Moscow News in connection with refugees leaving the country on rafts and was summoned as an expert by Russia's Duma (the lower house of parliament).

In 1995 and 1996, Brilyov was a special correspondent of the daily news programme Vesti broadcast by TV channel Rossiya during the First Chechen War and the hostage crisis in Budennovsk.

Brilyov had been due to start work on 17 September, but was called in to cover the attacks on U. S. targets live on air because of his knowledge of English and international realities.

E. g. Brilyov has interviewed such Americans as George W. Bush,[8] Barack Obama,[9] Colin Powell,[10] Condoleezza Rice,[11] John Kerry,[12] Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Britain's Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Boris Johnson, Robin Cook, Jack Straw and David Miliband, China's President Xi, former and future French Presidents Valéry Giscard d'Éstaing, Nicolas Sarkozy and Emmanuel Macron, and Russia's Vladimir Putin, Dmitry Medvedev, Evgeny Primakov, Sergey Ivanov and Sergey Lavrov.

In 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2018 he acted as the official co-commentator of the live ceremony of the inauguration of the President of the Russian Federation, along with Channel One's Ekaterina Andreyeva, with whom he also anchored Putin's early phone-in shows (2002–2007).

[14][15] He supported the 2020 amendments to Russian constitution, which are said to cement the existing structure of power, but explained that for him the most important part was that parliament will from now participate in the formation the federal government, which was previously composed exclusively by presidential decrees.