“The discrepancy between what was actually happening and what was being shown on Channel One was so stark that I wanted desperately to stop it.” Marina Ovsyannikova he acted impulsively without fully assessing the consequences of his gesture. So last Monday night he broke live on the First Russian Channel during the news he works for. In the hands a sign of protest against the war in Ukraine. Days later, the journalist herself, who suddenly became the face of antiPutin dissidence, retraced the story and told the reasons for this blatant action.
In an interview with Novaya Gazeta, Marina Ovsyannikova revealed that she developed a special impatience immediately after the start of military operations in Ukraine. “There was a terrible atmosphere on Channel One. releases from propaganda were broadcast nonstop, but before my eyes there was a completely different picture told by Western agencies,” admitted the journalist, who was born in Odessa in 1978. At that moment, the employee of the Russian state television began to evaluate his resignation thoughtfully but to anticipate it with an a symbolic gesture. “Anyone who went out on the street was immediately taken to the police station,” recalls Ovsyannikova, who therefore came up with a route without being stopped.
“On the eve of the campaign I made a poster at home, on Monday I went to work.” Was in it. Jacket in hand, I went to the office, quickly pulled the poster out of my sleeve and went straight to the studio with it,” the journalist said, adding that at first even the security guards didn’t notice anything. What happened next is partially known to everyone: the disgrace of Russian television, the arrest and then the arrest of the journalist, the interrogation that lasted 14 hours.
In the interview, Ovsyannikova also revealed details about the endless questions she was asked by the Russian police. “They immediately started ‘torturing’ me at the intelligence agencies they believed I was connected to. To the end, they couldn’t believe that I didn’t have accomplices, that I wasn’t working for them secret services Westerners that I had no conflicts with my colleagues, that Ukrainian relatives had not written to me. In general, they didn’t think this story was about citizenship, but they put forward some kind of conspiracy idea,” the reporter said, adding details about the threatening tone of the interrogation. The dissident also testified that she had to insist even her lawyers. “They said, ‘Yes yes, now there will be a lawyer’. But when I asked what kind of lawyer that was, they said he was from the state.”
Ovsyannikova, now they say “very worried“For the safety of their children, but also willing to stay in Russia. My family is here, my friends are here,” he admits, announcing that he has turned down France’s offer of asylum. “They have to feed their families, they have to pay loans and mortgages,” he says, and they don’t dare to to challenge the government, even though they understand the seriousness of the situation. “I don’t think they do. There are more than 23% of them staunch Putinists on federal television. These are intelligent and educated people who travel a lot around the world and of course understand what is happening in our country,” he says.
Russians, Marina Ovsyannikova assures, will slowly understand how things really are. His gesture, he adds, was just an attempt to speed things up.