About MIGnews

MIGnews

MIGnews is a Russian-language online news portal covering Israeli politics, economy, security and world news for Russian-speaking readers. Based in Tel Aviv, it publishes at mignews.com and belongs to the first generation of Russian-language Israeli websites created to serve the large community of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The portal takes its name from the Media International Group, the holding company founded in 2000 by the Ukrainian-Israeli businessman Vadim Rabinovich, which assembled Russian-language newspapers, weeklies and websites in Israel, Ukraine and the United States. Within that group, MIGnews was the Israeli title, and it has outlived most of the print empire around it to remain a working Russian-language news service for Israel.

Vadim Rabinovich and the Media International Group

MIGnews cannot be separated from its founder. Vadim Rabinovich, also transliterated Vadym Rabinovych, is a Ukrainian Jewish businessman and communal leader who headed the All-Ukrainian Jewish Congress and built interests across business and media. In 1997 he was involved in establishing the Ukrainian television channel 1+1, one of the country's leading broadcasters. In 2000 he founded the Media International Group in Israel, a company that brought together Russian-language media for the post-Soviet diaspora. The group's publications included MIGnews in Israel, the Ukrainian newspaper Stolichnye Novosti, the business weekly Delovaya Nedelya and the MIGnovosti newspaper in Ukraine. The founding logic was demographic: the collapse of the Soviet Union had scattered Russian-speaking Jewish communities across Israel, Ukraine, the United States and beyond, and Rabinovich treated media as the means of connecting them and of shaping public debate within them.

Expansion of the group

Through the 2000s the Media International Group expanded by acquiring existing titles. It purchased Novoe Russkoe Slovo, the long-established Russian-language newspaper published in the United States and the oldest Russian newspaper in that country, as well as the Narodnaia Volna radio station, the CN-Stolichnye Novosti political weekly, the Stolichka daily newspaper and the Moskovskiye Novosti weekly in Russia. Its internet properties included MIGnews.com, the Ukrainian MIGnews.com.ua, MIGsport.com and the websites of its print titles. The holding at its height therefore spanned newspapers, radio, television interests and websites in several countries, all addressed to Russian-speaking audiences. MIGnews, as the group's Israeli online flagship, sat at the centre of the largest of those audiences, the Russian-speaking population of Israel itself.

What MIGnews publishes

MIGnews is a general news portal in Russian whose centre of gravity is Israel. Its coverage runs across Israeli politics, including government, coalition and Knesset affairs; the economy and business; security, defence and the conflicts that shape Israeli life; and world news, with particular attention to Russia, Ukraine and the former Soviet Union, whose affairs its audience follows closely. Alongside the news file, the brand has developed a video presence under the name MIG TV, publishing exclusive interviews with Israeli public figures on the country's future, from demography and immigration to security and relations with neighbouring states. The combination is characteristic of the portal's role: it is not a translation wire but an Israeli newsroom working in Russian, selecting and framing the Israeli and international agenda for readers whose first language is Russian and whose home is Israel.

The audience: Russian-speaking Israel

The readership MIGnews serves was created by one of the largest migrations of the late twentieth century. The immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union, peaking in the 1990s, brought around a million Russian speakers to Israel, and community sources have long described a Russian-speaking population of about one million, with later estimates higher once descendants and newer arrivals are counted. This audience sustained an entire media sector in its own language: national Russian weeklies and monthlies, more than fifty local Russian newspapers, Russian radio and television, and a growing tier of Russian-language websites and messaging channels. Tens of thousands of additional Russian citizens have arrived since 2022, renewing the audience again. Web analytics estimates for mignews.com in late 2025 showed Israel as by far its largest source of visits, followed by the United States and Canada, a pattern that reflects both the Israeli core readership and the wider Russian-speaking diaspora that follows Israeli news from abroad.

Jewish News One and the group's television venture

The group's ambitions extended to international television. On 21 September 2011 Rabinovich and the Ukrainian businessman Ihor Kolomoisky founded Jewish News One, a news channel intended to present Jewish news and issues to an international audience in several languages. The channel operated until 2014. Although its lifespan was relatively short, it represented the same strategy as MIGnews applied to television: an attempt to place Jewish and Israeli affairs on the global agenda through media owned within the Russian-speaking Jewish world. In January 2014 it was announced that Rabinovich had sold Jewish News One and the Ukrainian website MIGnews.com.ua to the businessman Eugene Muraviev. The Israeli portal, MIGnews.com, was not part of that sale and continued under the group, a distinction that explains why the Israeli title survived the restructuring of the rest of the empire.

Rabinovich's political career

The founder's later career took him into Ukrainian politics, which forms part of the context in which MIGnews is owned. Rabinovich ran as a self-nominated candidate in Ukraine's 2014 presidential election and in the same year was elected to the Verkhovna Rada, the Ukrainian parliament, on the electoral list of the Opposition Bloc. In May 2016 he left that party and its parliamentary faction, and in July 2016 his party Center was renamed For Life, which later became part of the Opposition Platform — For Life grouping. His Ukrainian citizenship was later terminated and his parliamentary powers ended. Throughout these changes the Israeli media business he had founded in 2000 continued to operate from Israel, serving an audience for whom Rabinovich's significance is principally as the builder of the Russian-language media network of which MIGnews forms part.

Tel Aviv base

MIGnews is listed in this directory with its base in Tel Aviv, Israel's commercial and cultural centre and the hub of its media industry. A Russian-language newsroom in Tel Aviv sits at the intersection of the portal's two worlds: the Hebrew-language national media economy around it, from which much of the Israeli news agenda emerges, and the Russian-speaking public it serves, which is spread across the whole country, with large communities in Tel Aviv itself and in cities such as Haifa, Ashdod, Beersheba and Jerusalem. The portal's daily work, following Israeli politics, markets and security developments and publishing them in Russian through the day, is performed for that dispersed national audience rather than for a single city, with the website and its video channels as the newsroom's shop window.

The Russian-language information environment

MIGnews publishes into an information environment that has become strategically contested. Reporting in 2025 and 2026 on leaked files from a Russian influence operation described plans to shape opinion among Russian-speaking Israelis, a population the operation's own documents estimated in the millions, through placements, comments and cultivated voices across Russian-language television, radio, online outlets and messaging channels in Israel. The episode underlined a fact long recognised by Israeli media professionals: the Russian-speaking public is large enough, and distinct enough in its media habits, to constitute a separate arena of public debate. Established portals such as MIGnews, with recognisable brands and professional newsrooms, are the long-standing institutions of that arena, competing for the same readers as newer anonymous channels and foreign state media.

MIGnews today

Today MIGnews continues to publish at mignews.com as a Russian-language news portal on Israeli politics, economy, security and world affairs, with video interviews under its MIG TV brand. The print group from which it emerged has largely receded, its newspapers sold, closed or reduced, and its television venture ended in 2014, but the Israeli website endures as the working remnant of the Media International Group's original idea. For Russian-speaking Israelis, and for Russian-speaking readers abroad who follow Israel, MIGnews remains one of the established addresses created in the first years of the twenty-first century to give the post-Soviet immigration a news service of its own.