In today’s #vatnik soup, I’ll introduce a Russian grand propagandist Margarita Simonyan. She’s the Editor-in-Chief of RT and Rossiya Segodnya.

She is one of the best known Kremlin mouthpieces and controls a large Russian propaganda network.

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Simonyan started her journalism career covering the 2nd Chechen War. Later she was one of the first journalists to report on the Beslan school hostage situation in 2004. After this she moved to Moscow to join the Kremlin propaganda machinery. She was only 25 when she was... 2/10

... appointed as the Editor-in-Chief of RT. Andrei Richter, a journalism professor, stated that she got the job because of her connections. At the beginning, she told a reporter that Kremlin wouldn’t dictate any content and there would be no censorship in RT’s coverage. 3/10

In 2020, Simonyan defended a overtly racist TV segment where his husband and an actress was wearing blackface posing as Barack Obama. She stated that this kind of shit is okay because her husband is of Armenian background: businessinsider.com/kremlin-tv-sta…
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In regards to Ukraine, Margarita has been echoing the basic Kremlin rhetoric: Ukraine bombed Donbas for several years, Ukraine is full of nazis and that Russia is at war with NATO.

She’s also said that the food crisis will force the West to lift all sanctions on Russia. 5/10

She has also said some rancid stuff about the conflict. For example, on Feb 24, 2022 she tweeted that “This is a standard parade rehearsal, It’s just that this year we decided to hold the parade in Kyiv”. 6/10

She’s also said that “considerable portion of the Ukrainian people have turned out to be engulfed in the madness of nazism.” On “The Evening with Vladimir Solovyov”, Margarita said that she’s okay with nuclear war if it goes to that, because “We’re all going to die someday.” 7/10

She’s also encouraged Russia to war crimes, such as disabling Ukrainian nuclear power plants. In April, 2022, she proposed the removal of article on the prohibition of censorship from the Russian constitution, stating that “freedom of speech will lead to collapse of Russia”. 8/10

In 2018, Margarita wrote a script for a state-sponsored movie, “The Crimean Bridge. Made with Love!”. It was a horrible piece of propaganda and hated by all critics, but based on Navalny’s research, Margarita, her husband and her relatives earned ~700 000 USD for making it. 9/10

Margarita has suggested that Russia conquered Kyiv during the first week of the conflict and then simply gave it back:

https://x.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1599243012789264384

Simonyan has been sanctioned by Ukraine in 2016 and by the EU in 2022.

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