Meet Margarita Simonyan, queen of Russia’s covert information wars

Simonyan, who lived with an American family in New Hampshire in her teens during the 1990s and speaks excellent English, is known for her biting rhetoric and effective propaganda. Recently she delighted in poking fun at U.S. law enforcement questioning RT employees to prove a link between its actions and the Kremlin.

“What they were most interested in is whether I get my orders from the Kremlin. Listen, comrades,” she said, addressing U.S. authorities, “what do you think — that I get orders from the CIA? Where else would I get my orders from if I head a Russian state media outlet funded by the state?”

“Write it down for yourself!” she said. “All the employees of RT and the editor in chief only obey the orders of the Kremlin! All other orders are toilet paper!”

Last week the Justice Department indicted two employees of RT — formerly Russia Today — accusing them of money laundering linked to an operation that allegedly involved paying American right-wing influencers nearly $10 million to parrot Kremlin propaganda — just one part of a broader Russian campaign to promote the election of the Kremlin’s preferred presidential candidate, Donald Trump, and to undermine American support for Ukraine.

In Western countries “including the United States, we started to work covertly,” Simonyan said. “We organized a number of guerrilla projects. I won’t say if these are the projects about which the United States is accusing us, or different ones.”

The Treasury Department last week placed sanctions on Simonyan, whom it said was “a central figure in Russian government malign influence efforts,” as well as eight other employees of RT, a former Kremlin official and two companies. U.S. authorities also shut down 32 internet domains, though hundreds more reportedly still operate.

The actions targeted several major influence operations including the RT project, and a project code-named the Good Old USA Project, part of a Russian operation, Doppelganger, previously reported in The Washington Post, that is coordinated with Kremlin first deputy chief of staff Sergei Kiriyenko.

Simonyan, who also heads the Rossiya Segodnya and Sputnik news agencies, is central to the Kremlin’s global disinformation operation, which is a crucial part of Russia’s hybrid confrontation with the West. According to the U.S. government, it is designed to sow divisions in the United States and its allies, undermine American democracy, damage U.S. interests, boost Trump and undermine Western support for Ukraine.

Simonyan was just 25 when she was appointed head of Russia Today, as it was then known, when it was launched in 2005. Previously she had been a Kremlin reporter at a local television station.

Her dizzying rise is remarkable in a nation where few women have gained such heights, particularly one who — according to Simonyan’s official biography — was the daughter of a refrigerator repairman in the southern city of Krasnodar. She grew up in a house plagued by rats, with one outdoor tap and toilet shared by five families, according to the account.

At the age of 15 in 1995, she spent a year living with an American family: Andrew O’Hara, a plumber in Bristol, N.H., and his wife, Dorothy. (They died in 2022 and 2020, respectively.)

Simonyan draws on her time living in the O’Hara home in her frequent attacks on American education and what she portrays as an incurious, poorly educated nation. She said recently on state television that the O’Hara household did not contain a single book.

Speaking on Sunday night, she said that America’s education system was such a failure that citizens were ill-informed, portraying this as an intentional government policy “to completely deprive American citizens of it.”

“Because of all this there are some things they don’t understand. They still live with the red threat,” she said, and memories of the Iron Curtain.

Simonyan’s open admission on Sunday that RT runs covert information operations in the United States contradicted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who has frequently denied Russian foreign influence operations.

“Well of course it’s nonsense. We’re not interfering,” he said last week when the latest U.S. charges surfaced.

In April, Simonyan boasted about the “game” of whack-a-mole she makes the CIA play, creating hundreds of disinformation channels “not tied to us” that she claimed quickly built enormous audiences.

The CIA, playing catch-up, would shut down sometimes 600 channels at a time, she told state the television program “Fate of a Person,” “but while they’re closing them, we’ve already made new ones.” At one point she claimed her channel had amassed 14 billion views, a number that could not be independently verified.

In addition to her caustic remarks about U.S. foreign policy and fierce defense of Russian policy, Simonyan has made controversial comments about Ukrainians, accusing them of being irredeemable Nazis.

In April 2022, she said Ukrainians were suffering a kind of collective psychosis for resisting Russia’s invasion. “To my horror, to my regret, a considerable portion of the Ukrainian people have turned out to be engulfed in the madness of Nazism,” she said while speaking on pro-Kremlin NTV.

“It’s no accident we call them Nazis,” she said. “What makes you a Nazi is your bestial nature, your bestial hatred and your bestial willingness to tear out the eyes of children on the basis of nationality.”

In July 2022, she said Russia must build a future without Ukraine, “because Ukraine as it was can’t continue to exist. There will be no Ukraine as we’ve known it for many years past.”

Critics, including the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, have accused her of amassing a fortune by overcharging the state for services and assailed her record of genocidal rhetoric against Ukraine on Russian television.

In a 2020 investigative film titled “Parasites,” Navalny said Simonyan and her husband had raked in massive sums by providing illusory services to multiple state-owned companies.

“No matter how mediocre they are, almost a million rubles was pumped to them out of our pockets,” Navalny said in the film. “All the relatives are feeding at the trough. All their clients are state-owned.”

Simonyan did not respond to questions about the RT interference campaign or the Navalny documentary.

Navalny lampooned her for years with the nickname “Beaver-eater” after a 2012 social media post where she outlined her plans to boil up a beaver head for broth as the base for a beaver stew.

But she eventually had her revenge. When he ended a hunger strike in prison in 2021 protesting a lack of medical treatment, Simonyan sent him a parcel of dried beaver meat salami in a box with an RT sticker.