Margarita Simonyan Quotes

There'll not be the Ukraine we have known for many years. It won't be a Ukraine.

A war is completely unavoidable.

I noticed that mainstream western TV channels, especially CNN and ABC, show the same thing. It really ate me up inside. I realised that there are quite a lot of people in the world who don’t think that’s how it should be, so it probably makes sense to make something for them. Obviously if our audience is [only] Kremlinologists and Russia watchers, then that’s very few people.

The West never got over the Cold War stereotype. One thing that only few journalists understand is that Russia started dissolving the Soviet Union of its own accord. We were the ones to realize that Communism was a failure. We understood that it was wrong to impose our will on other nations. We released the Eastern bloc into freedom. We are a different country today, one with a different mentality -- which is something that Western journalists sometimes find difficult to comprehend. You, for example, stated earlier that Russia was acting aggressively without backing it up with facts.

We're all going to die someday.

Everything you say will be used against you.

So that it is understood, yes, in a hot war, we would defeat Ukraine in two days. What is there to defeat? My god, it's Ukraine. We suppress their firing points, as we discussed during the commercial, and then we won't even have to bomb their unfortunate cities. God forbid that it ever come to that.

This can only end with an immediate threat that is voiced and presented, a threat of a nuclear confrontation.

It’s true that no one will win in a nuclear war, but who needs the world if Russia isn’t in it? It was voiced out loud, it was said by Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin!

We are far less critical of western policy than western media are critical of Russia. When was the last time you read anything good about Russia? Anywhere? Name me one publication. That’s why this cliché that Russia Today is an anti-western channel brings a smile to my face.

Believe me, I’ve categorically forbidden everyone from inviting people who says nonsense or promote some unhealthy strange theories on air. But at the same time, if we only give airtime to the same people as the mainstream media does, it means it wouldn’t at all be clear why we’re doing this.

Why is there this constant talk of war? It's as if [the West] really wants us to destroy this unfortunate Ukraine. In Russia there is no war hysteria. We do have an anti-war movement, but we have no pro-war movement. It's surprising. The Americans say 'no, you must invade. We know it for a fact.'

We need to be ready for this war, which is inevitable, and which, of course, will start from Ukraine. For this, we need a Stalinist program of mobilization in order to sew up, sew up, sew up these vulnerabilities quickly, quickly. Because I don't want us to be too enamored of our capabilities.

If we were to conduct a thermonuclear explosion, a nuclear explosion, hundreds of kilometers above our own territory, someplace in Siberia, nothing scary would happen on the land.

I don't see any other outcome… It will be a wrecking ball! It will be all-in! It will be like two planes, flying head-on into one another. Someone will have to back down and something tells me that it won’t be us.