A Russian journalist who hijacked a state television broadcast to denounce the war in Ukraine has said she fears for her safety and hoped her actions would open her country’s eyes to propaganda.
Marina Ovsyannikova, 43, was charged with unlawful protest after her demonstration on Channel One on Monday. She was fined 30,000 roubles (£215) and released the next day.
She is an editor on the channel, which has presented a one-sided view of the conflict in Ukraine. She was interrogated for more than 14 hours before appearing in a Moscow court.
Ovsyannikova said that she had no plans to leave Russia and hoped to avoid further charges. “I believe in what I did but I now understand the scale of the problems that I’ll have to deal with, and, of course, I’m extremely concerned for my safety,” the mother of two told Reuters. “I absolutely don’t feel like a hero . . . you know, I really want to feel that this sacrifice was not in vain, and that people will open their eyes.”
Ovsyannikova interrupted a broadcast of Vremya, an evening news show that has millions of viewers. She held up a sign in a mixture of English and Russian that read: “No war. Stop the war. Don’t believe the propaganda. They lie to you here. Russians against war.”
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Her actions were lauded by President Zelensky and other western politicians. The Kremlin denounced her protest as hooliganism.
Russia’s media has referred to the invasion of Ukraine as a special military operation, and mostly parroted the Putin government’s justifications for the war, which it says is prompted by Ukraine and Nato’s “aggression”. There has been a wave of departures by staff opposed to the war. Russian media reported resignations at pro-Kremlin outlets, including veteran correspondents at Channel One and NTV, owned by the state energy giant Gazprom.
Kirill Ponomarev, a journalist who left his job at a state TV station in the southern city of Voronezh in the first days of the invasion, said that the mood among journalists was bleak because wartime censorship rules left them even more constrained. “A few have left, a lot more are thinking about it,” he said.
The Russian authorities announced yesterday that the BBC news website would become the latest in a series of news outlets and social media platforms to be censored. “I think this is only the beginning of retaliatory measures to the information war unleashed by the West against Russia,” a Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman said.
Ovsyannikova, who was born in Odesa, southwest Ukraine, while it was part of the Soviet Union, said that she wanted to send a message to Russians directly: “Don’t be such zombies; don’t listen to this propaganda; learn how to analyse information; learn how to find other sources of information.”
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She could still face charges of promoting “fake news” about the war in Ukraine, punishable by up to 15 years in prison, the state news agency Tass said.
