"There is no death, but God exists": Simonyan's Sochi festival pitch blends RT politics with a metaphysics of mission

The line landed like a sermon. Speaking at the "Eurasia-Kinofest" international film festival in Sochi on 13 June 2026, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT and the Rossiya Segodnya media group, told her audience that "there is no death, but God exists," according to a Telegram post by Ruptly that summarised her remarks. The setting was cultural, the language was metaphysical, and the subtext was the kind of civilisational framing that Russian state-aligned media has spent the last decade refining. The speech is a small event in itself, but it is also a useful lens onto a larger pattern: the steady fusion of cultural diplomacy, anti-Western messaging, and personal ideology that now characterises how Moscow projects soft power through its media apparatus.

That a media executive chose a film festival to deliver a near-theological declaration is the point. RT does not run on ad markets the way Western networks do; it runs on a model in which the broadcaster's editorial line and the state's broader worldview are expected to reinforce one another. Simonyan's "no death, God exists" line is less a stray confession than the kind of language that is increasingly threaded into Russian state-aligned cultural forums — statements that mix personal conviction with civilisational politics in a single breath.

The festival as a stage for a worldview

The choice of Sochi matters. The Black Sea resort city has long been a venue of choice for Russian statecraft that wants to look cosmopolitan without leaving the country — the 2014 Winter Olympics, annual investment forums, and now film events that position themselves as alternatives to Cannes, Berlin, and Venice. "Eurasia-Kinofest" has been developed explicitly in that register. By staging a high-profile panel with the head of the country's flagship international broadcaster, the festival is signalling that the cultural conversation it wants to host is not just about cinema, but about a counter-canon — a set of stories, values, and civilisational claims that push back against the framing the festival's organisers associate with European festival circuits.

Simonyan's intervention is the most public example yet of that logic in action. The phrase reported by Ruptly — "there is no death, but God exists" — is not a film criticism, and it is not a programming note. It is a claim about the kind of world the speaker believes cinema should help defend. Read alongside the long-running public statements Simonyan has made about Russia's civilisational distinctiveness, it is consistent with a worldview in which the West is a moral and spiritual project in retreat, and in which Russian-language media has a duty to articulate what comes next.

The politics of saying it on a festival stage

Two readings are available, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first is that Simonyan was speaking to her base — to the Russian cultural and media establishment that gathers in Sochi, which is already sympathetic to the message and to the messenger. In that reading, the line is reinforcement rather than persuasion. The second is that the festival is being used as a soft-power relay: a curated environment in which senior Russian media figures say things that the Western wire services will pick up, and that will then circulate as part of the broader argument that Russia offers a coherent cultural and spiritual alternative to the liberal-internationalist default. Ruptly's English-language Telegram post is the kind of channel through which the second reading gets amplified; a Western wire service would normally paraphrase the line, but the underlying message travels either way.

There is also a more uncomfortable reading. RT has spent years arguing that it is simply a foreign-language broadcaster doing journalism, and that the sanctions and broadcasting bans imposed on it in the European Union and elsewhere are politically motivated attacks on press freedom. Remarks of the kind Simonyan reportedly delivered in Sochi cut against that defence: a media executive who frames her work in quasi-religious civilisational terms is not plausibly describing a newsroom in the Western commercial or public-service tradition. The contradiction is not new, but every public appearance that hardens it makes the broadcaster's own position harder to defend in the courts and regulators of the countries where it is banned.

What the broader picture looks like

A single panel is not a policy, but it sits inside a longer trajectory. Russian state-aligned cultural and media institutions have spent the period since 2022 building out forums, festivals, youth programmes, and broadcast platforms that frame the conflict in Ukraine and the broader standoff with the West as part of a deeper civilisational struggle. "Eurasia-Kinofest" is one node in that network; Simonyan's Sochi appearance is one panel. The point of these events is not necessarily to recruit converts in the audience, but to produce material — quotes, clips, photographs, Telegram posts — that travels through Russian-language media and through sympathetic foreign-language channels, and that re-anchors the daily news cycle inside a worldview in which the West is the moral and political problem, not the framework that Russia is operating outside of.

That is also why the metaphysical register matters. The most effective propaganda is rarely the crudest; it is the framing that absorbs the audience's moral and existential questions and answers them inside the speaker's preferred narrative. A line about death and God, delivered by the head of the country's international broadcaster at a state-aligned cultural forum, is exactly the kind of statement designed to do that work. It is also the kind of statement that is difficult to rebut on a festival panel, because arguing against it requires entering the speaker's chosen register rather than staying with the question of, say, broadcasting standards or sanctions law.

What is still unclear

The available reporting on the panel is thin. Ruptly's Telegram post summarises the remark but does not provide the full text of Simonyan's address, the panel title, the festival programme around it, or the identity of fellow speakers. It is not yet clear whether the line about death and God was the centrepiece of a longer ideological address, a passing aside, or a response to an audience question. The press cycle around the festival — and the way Russian state-aligned media will frame the speech in the days that follow — will be the first real test of how the line is being positioned for a domestic audience. Western outlets have, as of the time of writing, not run dedicated reports on the Sochi remarks, which is itself a small data point about how the international press currently weighs such appearances.

For now, the headline is the headline. The head of RT, speaking at a Russian state-aligned film festival, told her audience that death is not the end and that God exists. Whether that line is read as personal faith, as a piece of civilisational signalling, or as another entry in the long catalogue of statements that have made RT a difficult property to defend in Western jurisdictions, depends on which audience is doing the reading. The festival, in the meantime, has the photograph and the quote it came for.

Desk note: Monexus has reported this from the Ruptly Telegram post that circulated the Simonyan remarks in English-language wire format. We have not relied on Russian-language state media framing of the same event, and we have flagged in the body where the available sourcing is thin.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/ruptlyalert
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarita_Simonyan
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rossiya_Segodnya