Marina Ovsyannikova, the former Russian state TV editor who famously interrupted a live news broadcast to protest against the start of the Ukraine war, has described her “chaotic” escape from house arrest in Moscow and how she fled across Europe to seek asylum in France.
“I didn’t want to emigrate until the very last moment,” Ovsyannikova said at a Paris press conference with the journalists’ organisation Reporters without Borders. “Russia is still my country, even if war criminals have power there. But I had no choice – it was either prison or exile. I’m very grateful to France, a free country, to have welcomed me.”
Christophe Deloire, the secretary general of Reporters without Borders, which helped organise the escape under the codename “Evelyne”, likened it to “the most famous crossings of the Berlin Wall”.
The Ukrainian-born Ovsyannikova, 44, gained international attention in March after bursting into a studio of Channel One, her then-employer, during a live news bulletin to denounce the Ukraine war, holding a poster reading “no war”. At the time, she was fined 30,000 roubles (£460) for ignoring protest laws.
She continued protesting against the war after quitting her job at Channel One. Last August, she was charged with spreading false information about the Russian army for holding up a poster that read “Putin is a murderer, his soldiers are fascists” during a solo protest on the Moskva River embankment opposite the Kremlin. She was subsequently forced to wear an electronic ankle bracelet and placed under house arrest in Moscow, where she was to await trial. She faced up to 10 years in prison if found guilty.
Ovsyannikova said that shortly before a court hearing in Moscow last October, her lawyers told her to flee to save herself and her 11-year-old daughter. They told her she wouldn’t survive prison, and that she would be “broken”.
She escaped from her house with her child on a Friday night “when all the security forces had finished their working week and were in rest mode”. She calculated there was less chance of being immediately pursued at the weekend.
Of the journey from Moscow through Russia, she said: “We went in so many different directions I don’t even know what direction we took, we changed to seven different vehicles.”
Ovsyannikova did not say which border out of Russia she crossed, but described how just before reaching it, the car they were travelling in got stuck in mud in a field.
“We had to run out of the car and find our way on foot through fields in the dark night. It was difficult, we didn’t have any phone network, we had to work out where we were by the stars. It felt like an eternity, it was a real ordeal. We wandered for several hours before finding the road, hiding from passing vehicles and tractors … I was losing hope. I was thinking ‘Why did I do this? Maybe it would have been better to go to prison.’ But thankfully, we reached the border where people were waiting for us.”
She said her departure from her Moscow home was so “chaotic” that she initially forgot to remove her electronic bracelet, breaking it off only when she had changed to a second car.
Ovsyannikova and her daughter eventually entered France on a Schengen visa. They found a remote house in the countryside before changing to several other locations. The night after Ovsyannikova’s “anti-war” action on the Russian news broadcast last March, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, had said publicly that France would give her consular protection or asylum.
Asked if she now feared for her life after the deaths of other Russian figures abroad, Ovsyannikova said: “I clearly do.” She said that when she spoke to Russian friends, they speculated about a poisoning or a car accident.
Ovsyannikova was born in Odesa to a Ukrainian father and Russian mother and grew up in the Chechen capital, Grozny, where she experienced the start of the first Chechen war.
She said she had decided to hold up a protest sign live on TV at the start war in Ukraine because she wanted to “burst the propaganda bubble” in Russia.
“My emotion was running high. I had a difficult childhood, very unhappy. I lived in Chechnya as a child. My house was destroyed during the Russian operations there and we fled with my family, with all the refugees, with no possessions, with nothing. I imagined the Ukrainian women having to live through that.”
She said she would “not stay silent” on the war in Ukraine and would continue to “do everything I can for this war to end”.
On Friday, Ovsyannikova published a book in German detailing her life and ordeal and setting out what she called the workings of the Russian state propaganda machine, describing how any news on Putin was never allowed to be followed by a negative news item on another topic.
“The problem is that all of Russia is in an information bubble of orchestrated propaganda,” she said. “There are no independent media. To have accurate information, you need a VPN on your mobile phone, and that’s the only way to access real information.”
