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The Moscow TV editor who staged a live on-set protest of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine said Sunday that the conflict is “Putin’s war, not [the] Russian people’s war.”
Journalist Marina Ovsyannikova ran onto the set of Russia’s main state news broadcast last week with an anti-war sign saying, “NO WAR” and “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here,” in English and Russian.
An anchor for the station, Channel One, was delivering the news at the time.
Ovsyannikova was charged with an “administrative offense’’ and fined about $280, at least for now.
She then appeared on ABC’s “This Week’’ with George Stephanopoulos to tell the world that Russians do not support the war.
“As the war began, I could not eat. I could not sleep,” Ovsyannikova said. “What we showed on our programs was very different from what was going on in reality.
“The propaganda on our state channels was becoming more and more distorted. The Russian people are really against the war. It’s Putin’s war, not [the] Russian people’s war.”
Ovsyannikova said she and her colleagues were shocked when the war broke out and that she realized she had to do something a week into the station’s coverage.
“I could show to the Russian people that this is just propaganda, expose this propaganda for what it is and maybe stimulate some people to speak up against the war,” she said of her decision to storm the set.
Ovsyannikova encouraged more Russians to speak up and voice their dissent.
“I was hoping that my performance, in a way, would help people change their mind,” she said.
The TV editor is apparently still in Russia, and while worried about her kids’ safety, she said she refuses to seek asylum elsewhere because “I am a patriot; I want to live in Russia. My children want to live in Russia.”
The protest, the mom said, was a “spontaneous decision” born from deep frustration and “dissatisfaction with the current situation has been accumulating for many years.”
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