Russian anti-war journalist Marina Ovsyannikova recounts escape

Russian TV journalist Marina Ovsyannikova has reappeared in Paris after she was forced to flee her home country following an on-air anti-war protest last year.

Ovsyannikova, who worked as a TV editor for Russian state media broadcast Channel One, recounted her harrowing escape to France after she gained international attention in March for bursting into the studio with a poster reading “no war.”

“I didn’t want to emigrate until the very last moment,” Ovsyannikova said at a Paris press conference on Friday with the journalist organization 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.”

Ovsyannikova, 44, was fined for ignoring protest laws and quit her job but continued speaking out against the war until she was charged with spreading false information for holding up a poster reading, “Putin is a murderer, his soldiers are fascists” during a solo demonstration, The Guardian reported.

She faced up to a decade in prison if found guilty, and her lawyers urged her to flee the country with her 11-year-old daughter to save their lives.

Secretary General of Reporters without Borders Christophe Deloire helped organize Ovsyannikova’s escape, giving her the codename “Evelyne.”

“I wrote my first text message to Marina the day after she went on TV with that sign,” Deloire told BBC. “I sent her a message saying: ‘Do you need help? We are here for you.’”

Ovsyannikova ultimately left on a Friday night, calculating that it would be her best chance because Russian security forces had just finished their work week.

She left Moscow and cut a winding path through Russia, repeatedly swapping cars to cover her trail.

“We went in so many different directions I don’t even know what direction we took, we changed to seven different vehicles,” Ovsyannikova said.

She did not say which border she crossed, but Ovsyannikova said that her car got stuck in a muddy field right before reaching the country’s boundary.

“We had to run out of the car and find our way on foot through fields in the dark night,” she said. “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,’ she added. “But thankfully, we reached the border where people were waiting for us.”

After Ovsyannikova’s on-air protest, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he would give her asylum, so she entered France and found a remote house in the countryside, but later moved to different locations.

She said she now fears for her life after her Russian friends speculated that she could be poisoned or killed in an orchestrated car accident.

On Friday, Ovsyannikova published a book in German about herself and what she dubs the Russian state propaganda machine, writing about how any news regarding Putin cannot be followed by a negative news segment.

“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.”