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- The editor of a Russian state television channel interrupted her network’s broadcast with an anti-war message.
- She also carried a banner criticizing state propaganda for lying about the war.
- The protest comes at a time of wider efforts to quell domestic opposition to the war.
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Maria Ovsyannikova, editor of Russia’s main state broadcaster, ran out and interrupted her network’s live feed, shouting her opposition to the invasion of Ukraine and carrying a banner telling viewers they were being lied to.
“Stop the war! No war! Stop the war! No war!” she shouted during a brief break on the air of Channel One.
On the sign she carried were the inscriptions: “Do not believe the propaganda” and “Here you are being lied to.”
— Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock) March 14, 2022
The Russian state news agency TASS later reported that Ovsyannikova had been arrested. He had previously referred to her as an “outsider” and then named Ovsyannikova as the editor of Channel One, the state television company in question.
The agency said Ovsyannikova could be held accountable for her actions under the country’s criminal code. An ally of Russian leader Vladimir Putin recently expanded the code to criminalize even calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “war.”
Ovsyannikova said in a cheeky pre-recorded message that it was time for the Russian people to rise up against the conflict.
“We have to stop this madness. Come out to rallies, don’t be afraid of anything, they can’t put us all in jail,” she said in a short video before her protest.
According to Max Seddon of the Financial Times, even reporting on Ovsyannikova’s protest was censored.
“To give you an idea of how radical Russia’s wartime censorship laws are: Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper of Nobel laureate Dmitry Muratov, posted a protest photo of Ovsyannikova that looks something like this,” Seddon tweeted, showing the image, which completely blurred the picture. the sign that Ovsyannikova held in her hands.
— Max Seddon (@maxseddon) March 14, 2022
Ovsyannikova also expressed regret about working online and her role in fueling Kremlin propaganda.
“Unfortunately, in recent years I have been working on Channel One, doing Kremlin propaganda. And now I am very ashamed of it,” she said in a video recorded before the protest. “It’s a shame to lie from the TV screen. I’m ashamed that I [was] allowed to zombify the Russian people.
Ovsyannikova directly accused Putin of the war, calling it a “crime.”
“What is happening now in Ukraine is a crime, and Russia is an aggressor country, and only one person is responsible for this aggression. That person is Vladimir Putin,” she said in a brief message.
She added that her father is Ukrainian and her mother is Russian, bringing the real effect of the conflict to an end.
“This necklace around my neck is a symbol that Russia must immediately stop the fratricidal war.”
The Kremlin has stepped up efforts to punish dissidents for a conflict over which it is illegal to declare war publicly. Thousands of anti-war demonstrators were arrested in the crackdown. CIA director Bill Burns told lawmakers last week that as many as 14,000 people may have been imprisoned for speaking out. The protests even shocked St. Petersburg, Putin’s hometown.
Prominent Western news organizations such as The New York Times have been forced to temporarily shut down operations or make efforts to hide the whereabouts of their reporters under the threat of a new law that allows 15-year prison sentences for those who call war a war.
Other Russians are simply fleeing the country, not knowing when or if they will return.
“This is like the biggest movement, the biggest exodus of Russian people 100 years ago, when a number of anti-communists fled the country after the Bolshevik revolution, including, in fact, my ancestors,” Valerie Hopkins told Anderson Cooper in Lvov. Ukraine earlier on Monday.
Translations by Alexander Vinogradov.