Russian film director and propagandist Tigran Keosayan has died at the age of 59, after months in a coma, his wife, editor-in-chief of state propaganda tool RT Margarita Simonyan announced on Friday.
“Tigran went to meet his maker overnight. Thank you to everyone who prayed. Please don’t call me or the family for now. Thank you all, thank you,” Simonyan wrote.
Keosayan, who had survived heart attacks in 2008 and 2010, was hospitalised at the end of December, according to Telegram channel Baza. It emerged in January that he had suffered “clinical death” and slipped into a coma from which he failed to emerge until his death on Friday.
Having directed around 20 films over the past three decades, including The Crimean Bridge. Made with Love!, a 2018 propaganda piece, Keosayan was placed under EU, UK, Canadian and Australian sanctions in 2022 for his support of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Keosayan and Simonyan had been together since 2012, were married in March 2022 and had three children together.
Earlier in September, sources told The Moscow Times that Simonyan, one of the Kremlin’s most prolific and vitriolic propagandists, may be leaving her post as editor-in-chief of Russian propaganda broadcaster RT following her cancer diagnosis.
During an appearance on fellow propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s prime time talk show on Russian state television, Simonyan said that she had surgery scheduled and gestured towards her left breast, adding that she had “come on air today to tell the truth, because it is always better to tell the truth yourself than to let the audience feed on rumours”. Simonyan, who is 45, subsequently clarified that she would be undergoing a mastectomy.