Conflicts & War

Russian reporter who interrupted news show with anti-war protest detained

Moscow, Jul 18 (EFE).- Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, who interrupted a state-run news broadcast to protest the war in Ukraine in March, was arrested Sunday near her home, according to posts on her social media.

“Marina has been detained,” her entourage said in a message posted on her Telegram account. “Information about her location is unknown.”

The post was accompanied by three photographs showing two police officers taking the journalist away in a white van.

She was later released.

“I’m home now. Everything is okey. It was China’s ‘first warning.”‘ But now I know that it’s better to leave home with a bag and a passport just in case. Thanks to the neighbor who was nearby at that moment. He brought me stuff and called my lawyer and friends,” Ovsyannikova wrote in a Facebook post.

Her lawyer, Dmitri Zakhvatov, had earlier confirmed her arrest to the official Ria-Novosti news agency.

“I assume that it is linked one way or another to her act of protest,” he added.

Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One television, interrupted a live broadcast of the nightly news “Vremya” on Mar. 14 with a poster against the Russian military offensive in Ukraine.

The poster had “No War” written in English, followed by Russian text, translated as: “No War. Stop the war. Don’t believe the propaganda. You are being lied to here.”

The journalist was found guilty for organizing or holding a public event without filing a notice and fined her 30,000 rubles ($277).

She later became a contributor for the German newspaper Die Welt, a job she left in early July, according to independent Russian news portal Meduza.

The journalist also staged a protest on Friday on a bridge near the Kremlin’s walls.

Three dolls, their faces and clothes stained red, lay on the ground on the ground in front of the journalist, who held a banner calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a murderer and saying that 352 children had died in the war in Ukraine, according to a video posted on her Telegram channel. EFE

mos/pd/lds

Related Articles

Back to top button