Woman interrupts Russian TV news broadcast to protest war

An anti-war protester ran behind a Russian news anchor and showed a sign protesting Russia’s war on Ukraine during the Russian state-run Channel One’s live broadcast on Monday.

The sign read: “Stop the war. Don’t believe propaganda. They’re lying to you here.”

Multiple journalists identified the protester as Marina Ovsyannikova, an editor at Channel One, one of Russia’s most popular news channels.

На Первом канале в прямом эфире выбежала женщина с плакатом pic.twitter.com/3EMbhSdIGU

— Ярослав Конвей (@YaroslavConway) March 14, 2022

She recorded a video beforehand, which has since gone viral, accusing the network of propaganda and apologizing that she worked there.

“Unfortunately, for the last few years I’ve been working for Channel One,” Ovsyannikova said in the video. “I’ve been doing Kremlin propaganda and I’m very ashamed of it — that I let people lie from TV screens and allowed the Russian people to be zombified.”

“We didn’t say anything in 2014 when it only just began. We didn’t protest when the Kremlin poisoned Navalny. We just silently watched this inhuman regime. Now the whole world has turned away from us, and ten generations of our descendants won’t wash off this fratricidal war,” she continued. She noted that her father was Ukrainian. 

The video was originally posted by OVD-Info, a Russian human rights media project aimed at combating political persecution.

According to reports, she has already been detained by authorities. 

In recent weeks, Russia has cracked down on independent media outlets. Putin introduced a new censorship law on March 4 that restricts the press from disseminating information to the public, prohibiting anyone from calling the invasion “a war.”

This censorship has led major outlets like The New York Times and Bloomberg to suspend their on-the-ground reporting in Russia, and many other journalists have left, fearing imprisonment.

According to OVD-Info, nearly 14,000 anti-war protesters have been arrested across Russia.