Short answers, pulled from the story.
RT was founded on the 6th of April 2005, when RIA Novosti registered ANO TV-Novosti as its parent organization. The channel was conceived by former Russian media minister Mikhail Lesin and Aleksei Gromov as a public relations effort to improve Russia's image abroad. It launched publicly on the 10th of December 2005.
RT is funded by the Russian government through the Federal Agency for Press and Mass Media. Start-up costs in 2005 were $30 million, with a first-year budget of $30 million. The annual budget grew from approximately $80 million in 2007 to a peak of $380 million in 2011. Between 2022 and 2024, RT is set to receive 82 billion rubles from the Russian government.
The EU banned RT and Sputnik on the 27th of February 2022, following Russia's invasion of Ukraine. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen announced the ban, covering all 27 member countries. The General Court of the Court of Justice of the European Union upheld the ban on the 27th of July 2022, ruling it was justified.
Margarita Simonyan was appointed editor-in-chief of RT at its launch in 2005, when she was 25 years old. A former Kremlin pool reporter, she had been working in journalism since she was 18. She remained editor-in-chief through RT's major expansions and controversies, and was sanctioned by the European Union on the 23rd of February 2022.
RT operates channels in five languages: English (since 2005), Arabic (since 2007), Spanish (since 2009), German (since 2014), and French (since 2017). The network also provides internet content in Russian, Portuguese, and Serbian, and launched RT Hindi and RT Balkan in 2022 and RT Brazil in September 2023.
No. Leaked internal documents showed RT hugely overstated its viewership, and between 2013 and 2015, over 80 percent of its viewership came from videos of accidents, crimes, disasters, and natural phenomena. In 2015, RT's average weekly viewing figure in the UK had fallen to around 450,000 people, less than half the audience of Al Jazeera English. RT's own internal documents showed its viewership represented less than 0.1 percent of Europe's television audience outside Britain.