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

Loading

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 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 US government, it is designed to sow divisions in the United States and its allies, undermine American democracy, and damage US interests.

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 a toilet shared by five families, according to the account.

Loading

At the age of 15 in 1995, she spent a year living with an American family, Andrew O’Hara, a plumber in Bristol, New Hampshire, and his wife Dorothy.

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.”

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.

Loading

“Well of course it’s nonsense. We’re not interfering,” he said last week when the latest US 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 television program Fate of A Person, “but while they’re closing them, we’ve already made new ones.”

In July 2022, she said Russia must build a future without Ukraine, “because Ukraine as it was can’t continue to exist.”

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 that 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 roubles 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.”

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.

Washington Post

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for the weekly What in the World newsletter here.