TASS

TASS covers EU sanctions on Russia as a party to them, since Brussels lists its director general. On 12 October it carried Kaja Kallas's posts on the adoption of the 22nd package, which added nearly 1,600 names to the EU's Russia lists, and then reported Estonia's later request to remove one company and one person.

TASS covers that machinery from inside it. The EU sanctioned its director general, Andrey Kondrashov, in June 2023, as it had his predecessor in 2022, and Canada and Ukraine list the agency itself. In September the EU renewed its individual listings for three years, to 2029, rather than six months; the agency reports each extension as it lands. Western outlets read TASS's sanctions stories for Moscow's framing and check the substance against Brussels.

During the Iran war TASS was where Russia's state companies and senior officials put their positions on record. On 20 April it carried Rosatom chief Alexei Likhachev's confirmation that Russian staff had finished evacuating the Bushehr nuclear plant, with 24 volunteers left behind.

On 4 July it reported Dmitry Medvedev's remarks at the state funeral in Tehran, where he likened Iran's power to shut the strait of Hormuz to having a nuclear weapon and reaffirmed Russia's treaty with Iran. Vladimir Putin skipped the funeral, so the TASS account of Medvedev's words was the Kremlin's main public signal that day. Western outlets quoted it as the record of Moscow's position.

On the Ukraine war TASS is the first channel for Kremlin orders. It published Vladimir Putin's decree of 22:00 Moscow time on 9 April declaring a 32-hour Orthodox Easter ceasefire, running from 16:00 on 11 April to the end of 12 April. Ukraine rejected the truce.

The same pattern held for the Defence Ministry's announcement on 29 April that the 9 May Victory Day parade would march on foot, with no tanks or missile systems, the first hardware-free Red Square parade in about twenty years. Because TASS carries such announcements verbatim, its text is the reference for what Moscow said, while the claims inside it still need checking.