Maria Baronova stepped down as editor-in-chief of the state television company Russia today last week, calling the government “totalitarian” after she quit her job to protest Putin’s policies. Ukraine invasion.
But she is not leaving Moscow, despite becoming known as an outspoken critic of the Kremlin.
“I have a son, I cannot leave because his father does not allow me to leave with him, and therefore I simply prefer to stay in Moscow … North Korea or a thermonuclear mushroom will kill us, ”said Baronova in Fox News interview.
“I wouldn’t quit and lose my salary and job if I was sure that we would be alive for many more years, but I really don’t know what will happen to all of us next. ‘
She said that Russia and the West were on the brink of nuclear war.
Russian opposition activist Maria Baronova (pictured) talking on her cell phone during an opposition rally in central Moscow, 2017. She resigned as editor of Russia Today last week.
But she fears it might not be Putin who strikes first — she believes his actions make him a target.
“I suspect that the Western world will take advantage of [nuclear weapons]”, Baronova said, while preparing food for her son, on the phone to Fox. “This is a very dangerous situation.”
Baronova did not start her career with the state media. She has been openly critical of Putin for years, participating in the 2011–2013 anti-government protests.
Having begun her education as a chemist, Baronova was not a typical cutthroat.
Her mother was a theoretical physicist turned actuary, a business professional who measures and manages risk and uncertainty.
Earlier in her career, she sold medical equipment, but had to leave to focus on her son’s learning difficulties. according to The New Yorker.
She became active during anti-government protests, during which she read the Russian constitution to a platoon of soldiers.
Baronova screams during an opposition rally in downtown Moscow in 2017.
In 2013, the Russian authorities put her on trial, but the charges were later dropped.
During her activities, she was often attacked, and once she was hospitalized.
Members of the punk band and activist group Pussy Riot were imprisoned during the same movement, leading Baronova to stage a one-woman protest at a church.
The authorities accused her of inciting riots and put her on trial.
But by a lucky chance, she ended up under an amnesty, becoming one of a dozen people whom the government decided not to punish.
Dedicated to helping other political prisoners in Russia, she took on the role of a journalist.
Baronova made a name for herself by covering events in Ukraine during the 2014 Maidan uprising. But the publication Dozhd, for which she worked, has since ended up in the Kremlin castle, like many others in Putin’s Russia.
After joining Russia Today, she told Fox that she wasn’t privy to editorial decisions that are usually left to the editor-in-chief.
Baronova said she spent most of her time on RT working on fundraising for mothers of children with cerebral palsy, often sidelined in broadcasting decisions.
She joined RT in 2019 after working for the network for three years before retiring last week.
When the war broke out, Baronova found that many of her work colleagues were echoing the Kremlin’s line about “denazification” of Ukraine by Russian troops.
“I finally understood what it was like,” she said in Russian on Sunday. “It looks like 9/11 really happened by Bush and Dick Cheney and it was done openly. Claiming that there will be no winners. And will continue to do so day after day. Day after day.’
The last straw for the former editor was not a decision imposed from the top down by the Putin regime, but the reaction to the war by those she worked with.
When the invasion of Ukraine began, a colleague wrote on Instagram:
“If you are now ashamed to be Russian, don’t worry, you are not Russian.”
Baronova publicly responded to the message. But the support of a colleague pushed her to the decision to leave the state-controlled network.
“Our grandfathers didn’t fight for this,” she said. told Mediate March 2 after resignation. And now they’ve been betrayed.
But despite being a government critic in the past, Baronova chose to stay in Russia for the sake of her family.
“The problem is that I know these people very well. They never send threats, they just kill, so there’s a kind of [a] strange silence around me, but I really think that we are now on the brink of nuclear war.
“I’m not exaggerating,” Baronova told Fox News from Moscow.
Opposition activist Maria Baronova (left) and pro-Kremlin political activist Maria Katasonova (right) meet before an unsanctioned protest
She first announced her resignation in an interview with Znak shortly after Putin launched his wild war in Ukraine.
“We are suspending our work due to a large number of restrictions that have recently appeared on the work of the media in Russia,” Znak said on its website following an interview on many news agencies Now Putin’s regime has fallen silent.
Baronova tells her friends to leave Russia even though she herself plans to stay.
“I’m staying here, looks like we’ve finally given up our land to this nightmare,” she wrote in an online post on Saturday. “Or maybe it has always belonged only to these Satanists.
On Friday, she received a WhatsApp call from an unfamiliar man who was holding a rifle in his avatar.
It turned out that someone turned to human rights activists for help in their criminal case, but the call made her tense.
“I came to the deep conclusion that there is no God after this,” she wrote in Russian after the invasion of Ukraine.
“The path of the logical limitations of the mind. Because if he had, he would not have allowed this with Ukraine. And with all of us.