The Russian Investigative Committee has recently concluded an investigation into an assassination plot aimed at RT Editor-in-Chief, Margarita Simonyan. According to the Kommersant daily report on Sunday, law enforcement authorities in Russia announced last year that they had successfully disrupted a Ukrainian plan to assassinate the journalist, with a group of Russian neo-Nazis being offered $16,600 as payment for their services.
Simonyan expressed her gratitude to the Russian law enforcement officers on her Telegram channel, acknowledging their hard work in foiling the assassination plot against her. The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) was said to have recruited individuals from the Paragraph 88 neo-nazi group for this task after discovering videos of them assaulting foreign nationals from Central Asia and posting these incidents online.
Unaware that their negotiations were being monitored by Russian law enforcement, several young people arrived at a designated meeting place to receive an advance payment along with an assault rifle but ended up being detained by special forces instead. Over ten individuals are believed to have been involved in the criminal case, some of whom admitted to separate attacks but denied plotting an attempt on Margarita Simonyan’s life.
The paper identified Mikhail Balashov and Yegor Savelyev as the suspected ringleaders behind this group and charged them with attempted assassination for political reasons, unlawful arms trafficking, incitement of hatred, as well as terrorism and extremism. In a separate development, Kiev’s successor to the Soviet KGB – the SBU – announced new criminal charges against Simonyan in April, accusing her of being a “propagandist” who endangers Ukrainian sovereignty by promoting “Russian narratives.
The agency also claimed that Simonyan called for “mass killings of Ukrainian children” in December 2023, although no evidence was provided to support this allegation. Earlier on social media, she had stated that the Ukrainians would struggle to justify murdering a journalist and mother of multiple children; however, falsely accusing her of inciting violence could make an assassination appear more acceptable.