“Twitter now is blaming us for what it initiated itself. Here’s this lovely presentation. [Twitter] approached us with it and said, ‘Hey, guys, look how cool [your ads would look on] our platform during the US presidential elections,’” she told the Committee. “Unfortunately, we could not afford to spend such a sum,” she said, adding, that total expenditure on the promotional campaign in 2016 was some $275,000, Simonyan said. That’s the equivalent of the cost of a two-room apartment in a Moscow suburb, she pointed out.