Maria Vladimirovna Zakharova is the Director of the Information and Press Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation from 10 August 2015. She has a degree of Candidate in Historical Sciences, the Russian equivalent of a PhD.
Zakharova was born on December 24, 1975, in Moscow to a family of diplomats. Her father, Vladimir Zakharov, moved the family to Beijing in 1981 when he was appointed to the Soviet embassy there. The family left Beijing in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed and returned to Russia in 1993. Her mother, Irina Zakharova, is an art historian who has worked at Moscow's Pushkin Museum. In 1998, Maria Zakharova graduated from the Faculty of International Journalism at MGIMO university in the field of orientalism and journalism.
Zakharova speaks English and Chinese fluently. Russians admire her straightforwardness, a combination of femininity and rigidity, and they often call her as «the Russian analog of Jen Psaki».
She joined the Russian Foreign Ministry after graduation and worked as an editor of the monthly magazine “Diplomatic Bulletin”. From 2005 to 2008, she was the press secretary of the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations in New York City. On 7 November 2005, Zakharova married Andrei Makarov at the Russian Consulate in New York City. They have a daughter Maryana, born in 2010.
From 2011 to 10 August 2015, Zakharova was the Deputy Head of the Department of Information and Press of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation. Her duties included organizing and conducting briefings of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as spokesman, the organization of work of official Ministry accounts in social networks, and information support of foreign visits of the Minister of Foreign Affairs.
Zakharova is known for her participation in political talk shows on Russian television and for her commentary on sensitive political issues in social networks. She is one of the most quoted Russian diplomats and was often opposed to Jen Psaki (the official representative of the US State Department before 31 March 2015).
On 10 August 2015, by order of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zakharova was appointed director of the Information and Press Department to become the first woman in the history of the department to hold this post. In 2016, she was chosen as one of BBC's 100 Women.
In 2017, Zakharova accused the European Union of hypocrisy over its different behavior towards the separatist crises in Crimea and Catalonia, after hundreds were injured by Spanish security forces preventing Catalans from voting during the Catalan independence referendum, saying "I see and read what is happening in Catalonia, and Europe will say something to us about the referendum in Crimea and the protection of human rights."
In 2021, Zakharova criticized a massive NATO military exercise called Defender-Europe 21, one of the largest NATO-led military exercises in Europe in decades, which began in March 2021. It included "nearly simultaneous operations across more than 30 training areas" in Estonia, Bulgaria, Romania, and other countries. She claimed that by conducting these exercises, NATO is gathering a "strike fist" near Russia's borders.
On 15 April 2021, she stated that in 2021 alone "NATO is planning seven military exercises in Ukraine. The active phase of the Defender Europe 2021 exercise, the most extensive exercise for many years, is to commence near Ukraine soon."
On 23 February 2022, a day before the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Zakharova was sanctioned by the European Union as "a central figure of the government propaganda" and for having "promoted the deployment of Russian forces in Ukraine". She is barred from entering the EU countries, and her assets there are frozen.
