Short answers, pulled from the story.
RIA Novosti traces its origins to the 24th of June 1941, when the Soviet Information Bureau (Sovinformburo) was established by resolution of the USSR Council of People's Commissars and the Communist Party Central Committee, two days after Germany invaded the Soviet Union. The modern RIA Novosti was created in September 1991 from the Information Agency Novosti and the Russian Information Agency.
On the 9th of December 2013, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree liquidating RIA Novosti and merging it with Voice of Russia to create Rossiya Segodnya. On the 10th of November 2014, Rossiya Segodnya launched the Sputnik multimedia platform as RIA Novosti's international replacement, though the RIA Novosti name and ria.ru website continued operating inside Russia.
On the 26th of February 2022, RIA Novosti mistakenly published an article titled "The arrival/attack of Russia and the new world", written by Petr Akopov, which was prepared in advance anticipating a Russian victory. It declared that Russia had won the Russo-Ukrainian War and that Ukraine had returned to Russia. The article was removed but was republished by Sputnik and translated by the Pakistani newspaper The Frontier Post.
Svetlana Mironyuk was the last editor-in-chief of RIA Novosti before its 2013 dissolution. She was the first woman ever appointed to lead the agency.
In February 2023, Canada placed RIA Novosti on its sanctions list. In May 2024, the European Union added it to its sanctions list, citing the spread of propaganda. In August 2022, Twitter also blocked four RIA Novosti profiles in 27 countries.
In 2005, RIA Novosti launched RT, originally called Russia Today, as a global multilingual television news network. RIA Novosti stated it "merely participated in establishing the channel" and that RT retained complete legal, editorial, and operational independence as a government-funded non-profit organization.