There have been many Russian propagandists, but few have fused politics and performance as completely as Margarita Simonyan. For two decades, the editor-in-chief of RT has served not just as a mouthpiece for the Kremlin but as one of the principal authors of its emotional universe, turning war into spectacle and family drama into patriotism. A profile by Svetlana Satchkova.
Margarita Simonyan and, in the background, Vladimir Putin. Photo: Kirill Kudryavtsev / ANP / AFP
On September 7, 2025, during the broadcast of Evening with Vladimir Solovyov on the channel Russia-1, Margarita Simonyan announced that she’d been diagnosed with a 'terrible, serious illness' and was about to undergo surgery she 'might not survive'.
'I spent a long time wondering if I should come tonight, if I should ever come back on air at all. I have many decorations, but I never wear them, except for this one,' she said, pointing to an order on her chest, which she’d received from Patriarch Kirill. 'I was certain I wouldn’t be here tomorrow, and probably never again. The Patriarch took my hand and said, “You are a warrior.” Because he said that to me, I felt I had a duty to come here and tell the truth myself.'
She then mentioned her husband, director Tigran Keosayan, who had been in a coma for several months, before invoking a group of young Soviet resistance fighters who were tortured and executed by the Nazis during World War II. Compared with those young women’s suffering, she argued, her own illness was hardly worth mentioning. Yet even as the comparison ostensibly diminished her ordeal, it recast it as a test of stoicism, sacrifice, and patriotic duty, implicitly placing her within the same moral lineage.
This was quintessential Simonyan: one of the most recognizable figures in Russia, personally sanctioned by Western governments for her role in promoting Putin’s regime and his war against Ukraine, she has perfected a distinctive brand of propaganda that draws on family life, religion, emotion, even grief, transforming private experience into a political performance until theatricality becomes indistinguishable from cynicism.
Shaping people's minds
Born into an Armenian family in Krasnodar, a city in southern Russia, Simonyan grew up in poverty during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the turmoil of the 1990s. Her father repaired refrigerators, while her mother traveled to Poland carrying huge bags of goods for resale. At thirteen, Simonyan sold sneakers at a market and wrote poems while dreaming of becoming a writer, as historian Ilya Venyavkin recounts in his book Temple of War. In high school, she won a place in an exchange program to the United States and spent a year at a public high school in New Hampshire. Upon returning to Russia, she enrolled at Kuban State University in Krasnodar.
At nineteen, Simonyan was already working for a local television station and covering the Second Chechen War as a war correspondent. Her reporting soon attracted attention in Moscow, and she was hired as a regional correspondent for the Moscow-based TV Center channel. In an interview with the newspaper Komsomolets Kubani, she explained the secret of her success: 'My formula is boundless ambition. When someone wants something desperately enough, they’ll achieve it.'
Three years later, in 2002, Simonyan was invited to move to Moscow and join the presidential press pool. When the Beslan school hostage crisis unfolded in 2004, she was one of the first journalists to arrive at the scene. But instead of reporting what was happening, she echoed the Kremlin’s line. She insisted that negotiations with the hostage-takers were impossible, minimized the number of people held inside the school—reporting 300 to 400 rather than the actual figure of more than 1,100—and said the attackers had made no demands, although they had. According to later accounts, the terrorists saw her television report, became enraged, and abandoned plans to release children under the age of seven. The siege ended when Russian security forces stormed the school, leaving 334 people dead, including 186 children. Six months later, the Russian Ministry of Defense awarded Simonyan a medal for her coverage of the Beslan attack.
'For Simonyan, journalism wasn’t about press freedom or objective reporting, but about fighting for influence and shaping people’s minds'
During this time, Putin was tightening his grip on freedom of speech in Russia, bringing much of the country’s media under state control. The architect of this system was his press secretary, Alexey Gromov, who liked Simonyan. When the idea of launching Russia Today came up, he offered her the job of editor-in-chief. She was only twenty-five, spoke fluent English, and had chosen to return to Russia after spending a year in the United States, which made her, in the Kremlin’s eyes, unquestionably patriotic.
'From early on, Simonyan openly said that journalism was a tool of influence,' Ilya Venyavkin told me over Zoom. 'In her view, it wasn’t about press freedom or objective reporting, but about fighting for influence and shaping people’s minds. She described herself as a soldier on the ideological front.'
24-year old Margarita Simonyan reporting from Beslan for Russian public televion, 2004.
Russia Today, launched in 2005 and later rebranded as RT, quickly grew under Simonyan’s direction into an international network, fueled by enormous government investment. Tasked with improving Russia’s image abroad, it produces television and online content in multiple languages for audiences around the world. 'RT gave a voice to many people in the West who were dissatisfied with the existing order,' Venyavkin told me. 'Simonyan put all of that in the service of the Russian state. The network successfully spread false narratives, discredited Putin’s opponents, and sought to present him in the best possible light. Among people frustrated by the global dominance of American policy, that message has found a receptive audience.'
Simonyan herself also took on a more visible role in Russia’s domestic politics, becoming a regular presence on state television talk shows. After the mass protests of 2011–2012, she adopted the persona of an ordinary city resident, someone who acknowledged that Russia’s political system was flawed but warned that the protesters risked plunging the country into chaos. Speaking about Alexey Navalny, she said: 'When someone exposes the ills of society and fights corruption, I’m completely in favor of it. But when it’s done with money from foreign organizations hostile to us, and mixed with nationalism, chauvinism, and fascism, there can be no justification for it.'
After the annexation of Crimea in March 2014, RT shifted into what amounted to an information war. Their coverage accused Ukraine’s authorities of fascism and genocide, exaggerated civilian casualties, circulated fantastical accounts of atrocities against women and children, and portrayed Western governments and media as hypocritical. By then, Simonyan’s proximity to the Kremlin was no secret. A government landline sat on her desk, and in 2015 she acknowledged that it was a secure line directly to the Kremlin, used, in her words, 'to discuss secret things'.
From both a creative and a managerial standpoint, Simonyan proved remarkably effective. Under her leadership, RT expanded into a global media network with a massive YouTube following. In 2013, she also became editor-in-chief of Rossiya Segodnya, the state-owned international media group created by the Kremlin. At the same time, she built a formidable public profile, maintaining a large presence on social media, hosting a television program on NTV, producing her husband Tigran Keosayan’s satirical show, writing food columns, and working as a screenwriter.
In 2018, Simonyan wrote the screenplay for The Crimean Bridge. Made with Love!, a romantic comedy celebrating Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which was directed by her husband. The film was made on a budget of about 154 million rubles, roughly two-thirds of it financed by the Russian state. Two years later, in his YouTube investigation titled 'Parasites,' Alexei Navalny alleged that about 46 million rubles of the budget had gone to Simonyan, Keosayan, and their relatives through inflated fees and contracts. Both denied the allegations.
Simonyan is a regular in Evening with Vladimir Solovyov on Russian public television. Screenshot: Rutube
Public meme-persona
As Simonyan’s profile grew, she became the subject of countless memes, often because of her propensity to say outrageous things. Since 2012, she’d been known as 'the beaver-eater,' after posting that she’d bought a beaver and was planning to cook it. (For context, beaver is not something Russians normally eat. Apart from Simonyan, I’ve never heard of anyone doing so.) The post went viral, spawning an endless stream of increasingly ridiculous jokes.
Первый раз в жизни буду готовить бобра. Опросила знатоков. В итоге, сварю бобриную голову с луком, морковью и лаврушкой для бульона...
— Margarita Simonyan (@M_Simonyan) December 30, 2012
One of the biggest waves of memes followed one of the most notorious propaganda performances of Simonyan’s career. In March 2018, former GRU [Russian military intelligence, Ed.] officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with the Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury, England. British authorities identified two suspects, Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov, whom they said were officers of Russian military intelligence. Simonyan then interviewed the two men on television. They claimed they were merely tourists who had traveled to Salisbury to admire its famous cathedral and its spire. The interview was so unconvincing it bordered on farce. Subsequent investigations by Bellingcat and The Insider identified 'Ruslan Boshirov' as Colonel Anatoliy Chepiga and 'Alexander Petrov' as military doctor Alexander Mishkin, both GRU officers.
The infamous interview of Simonyan with the Russian military intelligence officers suspected of poisoning Sergey Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, UK. Dubbed version by The Guardian.
Over the years, Simonyan’s public rhetoric became increasingly extreme. She defended the persecution of independent journalists, dismissing them as 'agents of the West,' called for using Russia’s Black Sea blockade to starve the world into submission, and, in 2023, proposed detonating a nuclear weapon high above Siberia, which, she claimed, would cripple global communications and force the West to abandon Ukraine.
Putin repeatedly rewarded her loyalty, presenting her with the Order of Alexander Nevsky in 2019 and the Order of Honor in 2022. Accepting the latter, Simonyan pledged to 'keep wiping out the cannibals for as long as you require. I serve Russia.' By then, RT claimed to reach 700 million households in more than 100 countries.
Patriotism and sacrifice
When, in 2025, her husband, Tigran Keosayan, fell into a coma and died nine months later, and she herself was diagnosed with cancer, Simonyan folded the family’s tragedy into a performance of patriotism and sacrifice. She told viewers that Russians are a people of exceptional fortitude who would outlast everyone else and ultimately prove themselves right. 'Simonyan has never separated her personal life from her professional or political one,' Venyavkin told me. 'She once said that, while she was pregnant, her water broke during a meeting at the Presidential Administration. It’s part of the image she’s cultivated: that she pours her whole soul into serving the state.'
Many people, however, doubted that she was really ill. Partly this was because she continued to work actively, appearing alongside Putin at official events and accompanying him on a state visit to India. But it was also because she had spent her career lying. When she later said on television that one of her children was suffering from an incurable illness, many responded not with sympathy but with scoffing.
Throughout all this, Simonyan remained deeply invested in another ambition: becoming a recognized novelist. In 2026, she published her third book of fiction and her second novel, In the Beginning Was the Word—in the End Will Be the Number, a dystopian tale about a future ruled by artificial intelligence. Almost immediately, it became embroiled in scandal when it appeared on the longlist for Russia’s prestigious Big Book Award only after the list had already been officially announced, prompting accusations that it had been added retroactively. The organizers blamed a 'technical error,' but the explanation convinced few. Judging by her Telegram channel, where roughly half the posts are devoted to the novel, Simonyan believes she’s written a work of great literature and that it’s an instant classic. In reality, it’s comically bad and heavily plagiarized. Critics have mocked its prose and produced detailed reviews and YouTube analyses dissecting its literary shortcomings.
Simonyan’s first novel, Heading to Moscow!, loosely based on her own life and published in 2010, is dedicated to her family and 'to Gogol, without whom nothing is possible.' Nikolai Gogol was born in a small town in what is now Ukraine, came to Moscow as a young man, and became one of the greatest writers in the Russian language. Perhaps that was all Margarita Simonyan ever wanted, but fate had other plans. Instead, she became a 'Valkyrie of propaganda,' as The Financial Times described her when it included her among the world’s most influential people in 2025.
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