Margarita Simonovna Simonyan (; born 6 April 1980) is a Russian journalist. She is the editor-in-chief of the Russian state-controlled media organisations RT (formerly Russia Today) and Rossiya Segodnya. In 2022, Simonyan was sanctioned by the European Union as "a central figure of the Russian Government propaganda" responsible for "actions and policies which undermine the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine". In January 2023, Ukraine imposed sanctions on Margarita for her support of 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Early life, family and education 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. 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 to the Urals along with thousands of other Hamshen Armenians. Her father was born in Yekaterinburg (Sverdlovsk). 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. 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. She spent a year as an exchange student in Bristol, New Hampshire, in 1995. Career 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". 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. In 2010, her first book, Heading