Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan to step back from RT after breast cancer diagnosis

Margarita Simonyan, one of the Kremlin’s most prolific and vitriolic propagandists, revealed on Sunday that she would be leaving her post as editor-in-chief of Russian propaganda broadcaster RT following her diagnosis with a “terrible, difficult” disease, The Moscow Times reported on Monday.

During an appearance on fellow propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s prime time talk show on Russian state television on Sunday evening, Simonyan said that she had surgery scheduled and gestured towards her left breast, adding that she had “come on air today to tell the truth, because it is always better to tell the truth yourself than to let the audience feed on rumors”.

Simonyan, who is 45, subsequently clarified that she would be undergoing a mastectomy, to which she gave a political spin by comparing her impending medical treatment to that meted out as a punishment by German soldiers to members of a Soviet anti-fascist resistance group during World War II.

Recalling the torture and execution of a group of young communist partisans in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, the veracity of which is itself disputed, Simonyan said she considered herself fortunate when she remembered “the girls from The Young Guard, who knew that their breasts would be cut off while they were still alive, unlike me, under anesthesia.”

In January, Simonyan, who is under US and European sanctions for her role directing one of the Kremlin’s key propaganda networks, revealed that her film director husband, Tigran Keosayan, who had been suffering from severe heart disease for many years, had fallen into a coma and was clinically dead.

An aggressive and outspoken supporter of the war in Ukraine who was appointed to head RT aged just 25, in 2022 Simonyan said that Putin’s government would rather perish in a nuclear war against the rest of the world than recognise a military defeat in Ukraine, while the following year she suggested that Russia detonate a controlled thermonuclear explosion over Siberia to knock out global communications systems.