Famed Antiwar Protester Was Once Cog in Russia’s Propaganda Machine
For 20 years, Marina Ovsyannikova worked for Russian state TV. What compelled her, shortly after Ukraine was invaded, to storm a live broadcast and tell viewers they were being lied to?
By Constant Méheut
Her feet stuck in muddy soil on a pitch black October night, Marina Ovsyannikova stopped in despair. For four hours, she and her 11-year-old daughter had been trudging through plowed fields leading to Russia’s border, trying to escape the country. With no phone signal, they had been navigating by the stars, diving to the ground when the headlights of border guards’ cars approached. They were lost.
“It was real hell,” Ms. Ovsyannikova said, recalling how she sat down in the mud and moaned, “Take me back to Moscow. I’d rather go to jail.”
And prison was a very real possibility for her if she did return.
Her antiwar protest a few months earlier had rattled the Kremlin and earned headlines around the world...
Convinced both that she was innocent of any crime and that she had no future in Russia, she engineered her escape: She cut off her electronic monitor, swapped cars six times on her way to the border, then went the final distance by foot, finally sneaking under a barbed-wire border fence, before ultimately making her way to France, where she now lives in exile.
For the whole article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/world/europe/russian-antiwar-protester-ovsyannikova.html?searchResultPosition=1
https://dnyuz.com/2023/03/24/famed-antiwar-protester-was-once-cog-in-russias-propaganda-machine/