Chic dress photos. With a new haircut. On a plane. Most of the time, a pout on the lips. There was nothing on Marina Ovsiannikova’s Facebook page to suggest that the Moscow television producer was the type to go all out for a political cause.
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And yet that’s what she did on Monday night on Russia’s most-watched newscast, Vremia (Le Temps), on the Piervi Kanal, the state channel. As news anchor Ekaterina Andreeva busied herself, Marina Ovsiannikova burst in with a handmade poster. “Stop the war. Don’t believe the propaganda. You are being lied to here”, can we read in Russian. The last line of the poster is in English: Russians against the war.
The presenter and her bun did not flinch, but the chain quickly launched a report to make the intruder disappear. She was arrested on the spot.
The mother of two young children, herself of a Ukrainian father and a Russian mother, had planned the coup. Before her brilliant gesture, Marina Ovsiannikova had notified close friends and recorded a video in which she denounced the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the clip, which is now circulating online, she says she is ashamed of years of helping to spread the Kremlin’s lies to Russian viewers and calls on her fellow citizens to rise up.
For long hours after her arrest, the Russian journalistic community worried about her, but Marina Ovsiannikova reappeared in court on Tuesday, claiming to have undergone a 14-hour interrogation. She was fined $300 and released.
However, her lawyer notes that she did not come out of the Siberian forest. He expects a criminal investigation to be opened. His client could be charged with “hooliganism” (a crime punishable by eight years in prison) or, worse, of having violated the new law criminalizing the dissemination of “false information” about what the Kremlin calls a “military intervention”. special” in Ukraine. Violators can face up to 15 years in prison. And Marina Ovsiannikova could become the guinea pig.
In this context, it is not surprising that Radio-Canada/CBC, the BBC, CNN and other major international media stopped broadcasting their reports in Russia after the entry into force of this law which makes independent journalism terribly perilous.
“I’ve been a journalist in Russia for 20 years and we’ve never had so many limits and rules about what we can write and what we can’t write as in the past few weeks,” Elena Chernenko told me over the phone. seasoned journalist from Kommersantone of the major Moscow newspapers.
The anti-fake news law passed on March 4 is as close to military censorship as one can imagine. You can’t even use the word “war” to talk about what is happening in Ukraine.
Elena Chernenko, journalist of Kommersant
Under the circumstances, hundreds of Russian reporters have taken the road to exile, for the most part to Istanbul, in Turkey, or to one of the former Soviet republics of Central Asia or the Caucasus, where they can settle without Visa. Those who remained in Russia are walking on eggshells.
The situation is even worse on Ukrainian territory. In two weeks of conflict, more than 12 journalists covering the war in the field have been deliberately attacked by the Russian army, according to a report by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), dated 8 March. And that number has been growing ever since. “Reporters in the field are targets for belligerents despite the rules that protect journalists,” laments Jeanne Cavelier, RSF’s head of Eastern Europe.
Over the past few days, at least four journalists have died, three of them in targeted attacks.
This is particularly the case of Brent Renaud, an American filmmaker who was killed in Irpin, near Kyiv, on Sunday. The soldiers opened fire on the documentary filmmaker and his collaborator, the journalist Juan Arredondo. The latter was seriously injured.
On Monday, cameraman Pierre Zakrzewski, 55, and Ukrainian journalist Oleksandra Kuvshinova, 24, on assignment for Fox News, also died. The vehicle they were in was riddled with bullets.
One can only conclude that Vladimir Putin is not waging just one war in Ukraine, but two. One against the country, the government and the people of Ukraine. The second against journalism, information and truth. And like the first, it looks bloody and unscrupulous.