Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of the Russian state-controlled media organization Russia Today (RT), commented during a state TV broadcast that World War 3 is going to break out in the Middle East. Simonyan further claimed that the third global war will stem from the Israel-Hamas war and that this will distract the world from Russia’s ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

She spoke alongside host Vladimir Solovyov, one of the most prominent figures in Kremlin-backed media, according to a report by Newsweek. 

“Margarita Simonyan predicted that WWIII would soon start in the Middle East and expressed her hope that it would distract the West from Russia,”  The Daily Beast’s Julia Davis wrote on Sunday in a post on X, formerly Twitter, alongside the video. “Meanwhile in Russia: Vladimir Solovyov claimed that ‘Satanic NATO’ started the war when it attacked Russia.”

“Will there be a World War 3? I think that World War 3 will certainly happen! There’s bad news and good news about this,” Simonyan, a loyal ally of Putin, began. “The bad news is that it will happen without fail and in our lifetime. As long as a brick doesn’t fall on our head tomorrow, it will happen in the near future.”

“The good news is that we won’t participate in it,” said Simonyan, adding that Russia “will be observing from the sidelines.”

“A world war will definitely break out and it will break out in the Middle East. It will fire up for sure, there’s no way around it,” the Kremlin propagandist continued. “However tragic it is that there’ll be a war and casualties, the good news in it for us is that Western powers will be distracted with that, and even though they won’t completely leave us alone, they will kind of forget about us.”

This is not the first time Simonyan claimed that the Israel-Hamas war would lead to World War 3. Last October, she said on state TV that the United States and the United Kingdom were “leaving Ukraine” and now have “no more time for Ukraine” amid the Israel-Hamas war because “the world is on the brink of World War 3.”