Top Editor at Russia-Backed RT Reportedly Quits in Protest of Ukraine Invasion

Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP/Getty Images

A top editor at Kremlin-backed media conglomerate RT has quit her job in protest of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

Maria Baronova, the editor in chief of RT’s Russian-language edition, said she resigned from the outlet in an interview with news outlet Znak.

Baronova told Znak she “has nothing left to talk about” with those who support the invasion of Ukraine, and would not be speaking further about her resignation on social media platforms.

Baronova previously spoke out against the invasion in a post on her Telegram. In a post published Feb. 26, she described Putin’s government as “totalitarian” and said it has turned the lives of Russians into “an endless hell.”

“Our grandads didn’t fight for this,” she said. “And now they’ve been betrayed.”

The post was a response to Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of English-language RT and a close Putin adviser, who has mocked resistance to the war, as well as her country’s own anti-war protestors.

“If you are ashamed of being Russian now, don’t worry, you are not Russian,” Simonyan said as thousands took to the streets in Russia to protest the invasion last week.

Baronova took an unlikely path to the top of RT’s masthead.

In 2019, when she first joined the Kremlin-funded news outlet, she was known as an opposition activist. Time magazine once described her as “the face of Russia’s opposition.”

The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, who met Baronova during protests against the Russian government in 2011-2012, described her record of activism in 2019:

Maria Baronova, who is thirty-four, was active in the anti-government protests of 2011 and 2012. In June, 2012, she was charged with inciting a mass disturbance—she was one of a dozen people whom the government chose to punish, in order to frighten people from protesting again. In December, 2013, while her trial was under way and on the eve of the Olympic Games in Sochi, Baronova, like the members of the art-protest group Pussy Riot, who were then in prison, was given amnesty. During the following five years, Baronova worked primarily as an organizer on behalf of political prisoners in Russia.

In an interview with Gessen, Baronova appeared to express hope that she could change Russia for the better through her job at RT.

“It’s 2019, and everything is dominated by the state,” she said. “I’m never going to have another country. I’m not going to have another life, either. I want this country to be livable.”

Others were more skeptical. Opposition leader Alexei Navalny said at the time that Baronova’s defection from the opposition to the Kremlin’s top media outlet was predictable.

“[W]hat surprises me is that this surprises others,” he wrote in a tweet.