Margarita Simonyan

Her father's family, originally from Trabzon, settled in Crimea during the Armenian genocide of 1915.

During World War II, they were deported by Stalin's NKVD secret police to the Urals along with thousands of other Hamshen Armenians.

Her father was born in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk).

Margarita Simonovna Simonyan (Маргарита Симоновна Симоньян; born 6 April 1980) is a Russian media executive.

She is the editor-in-chief of the Russian state-controlled broadcaster RT, as well as the state-owned media group Rossiya Segodnya.

She spent a year as an exchange student in Bristol, New Hampshire, in 1995 under the FLEX Program (Future Leaders Exchange Program).

Simonyan, as a correspondent, covered the Second Chechen War, and also serious flooding of the Krasnodar region, for her local television station, receiving an award for "professional courage".

Covering Second Chechen War in the 2000s while working as a journalist, Margarita Simonyan promoted a pro-government position.

Subsequently, she worked at Krasnodar television, was VGTRK's own correspondent in Rostov-on-Don, and worked as a special correspondent for the Vesti TV news program.

She is a member of the board of directors of Channel One Russia and a member of the Academy of Russian Television.

At the age of 25, she was appointed head of Russia Today (RT).

In 2022 and 2023, Simonyan was sanctioned by the European Union, United Kingdom, and other states for her central role in state propaganda before and during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Simonyan was born in the southern Russian city of Krasnodar, into an Armenian family.

Both her parents are descendants of Armenian refugees from the Ottoman Empire.

In 2002, she became a regional correspondent for Russia's national Rossiya television channel and covered the 2004 Beslan school hostage crisis.

Simonyan, one of the first correspondents to arrive at the scene, witnessed the killing of 334 people, 186 of them children.

She told an interviewer "It was the worst thing that ever happened to me," and that she 'cried frequently' while trying to write about it.

She then moved to Moscow where she joined the Russian pool of Kremlin reporters.

She was the first vice-president of the Russian National Association of TV and Radio Broadcasters and a member of the Civic Chamber of the Russian Federation.

Simonyan was only 25 when appointed editor-in-chief of RT (then known as Russia Today) in 2005, but had been working in journalism since she was 18.

RT began broadcasting on 10 December 2005 with a staff of 300 journalists, including approximately 70 from outside Russia.

Simonyan frequently addresses media questions about RT's journalistic and political stance.

At its launch, Simonyan stated that RT's intent was to have a "professional format" like the BBC, CNN and Euronews that would "reflect Russia's opinion of the world" and present a "more balanced picture" of Russia.

She told a reporter that the government would not dictate content and that "Censorship by government in this country is prohibited by the constitution."

She later told The Moscow Times that RT started to grow once it became provocative and that controversy was vital to the station.

She said that RT's task was not to polish Moscow's reputation.

The station has however been criticised repeatedly in the West for perceived bias.

Simonyan has been quoted as saying: "There is no objectivity – only approximations of the truth by as many different voices as possible".

She stated in a 2008 interview that "her age often leads people to make assumptions about how she got her job."

Andrei Richter, the director of the Moscow Media Law and Policy Institute and a journalism professor at Moscow State University, suggests that she was "appointed because she is well-connected."

She is a Kremlin loyalist who is close to President Vladimir Putin.

In 2010, her first book, Heading to Moscow! was published.

In 2018, Simonyan wrote the script for The Crimean Bridge. Made with Love!, a film directed by her husband, Keosayan.

The film attracted scathing reviews, and was even the lowest-rated film on several film review aggregators, with Simonyan's script widely panned.

Her mother was born in Sochi to an Armenian family that had fled the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks in the late 19th century.

Her two grandfathers were World War II veterans.

Simonyan has described herself as both Armenian and Russian.

Her family owns a restaurant in the town of Moldovka in Adlersky City District, Sochi.

Simonyan has stated that she is from a working-class family and decided at an early age that she wanted to become a journalist, first working for the local newspaper, and then for a local television station while studying journalism at Kuban State University.

Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny released a video in March 2020, alleging serious corruption during the production of the film, with state funds intended for film production being siphoned off to Simonyan's relatives.