Russian Court Sentences Main Defendant in Margarita Simonyan Assassination Plot to 20 Years

In June 2023, unidentified individuals hired extremist Mikhail Balashov to assassinate the editor-in-chief of Sputnik's parent media group Rossiya Segodnya and editor-in-chief of RT, Margarita Simonyan, for a sum of $50,000, according to the Prosecutor General's Office.