Russian journalist Marina Ovsyannikov told how she fled from
Later, information appeared that the editor of Maryna Ovsyannikov was detained. After Marina, she went from the Russian Federation, but she gave a candid interview about her escape only now, the British edition of the Daily Mail. Shortly after Marina Ovsyannikov appeared with a poster behind the back of the long -term presenter of the "Time" program Kateryna Andreeva, she began problems. She was detained, for some time her lawyers did not know where she was.
After escaping, she briefly came to Ukraine, where she intended to give a press conference, but the Ukrainians were against her speech and canceled. She worked in Germany for a while. However, she only told how she managed to leave the Russian Federation with his 11-year-old daughter. She was interviewed in Paris, where she now lives. President Emmanuel Macron proposed an Ovsyannikov political asylum and round -the -clock security.
The journalist notes that it is guarded by two guards, and one of them accompanies her everywhere, wherever she goes. "Currently, the most dangerous time. I know too well what can happen to the Kremlin's enemies. But we are getting more and more. Putin can't make all of us silent," says Marina. After her appearance on the air of the First Channel, Marina Ovsyannikov became a celebrity. But she says she lost everything.
Her older son, 17-year-old Cyril, says she has destroyed their lives and refuses to talk to her. Her own mother told her that she would shake her country and turned away from her. Her ex -husband, directed by Russia Today, turned away from her. After her speech, he applied for custody of their children. And after she left Russia, he and his new wife occupied her apartment. "I lost a lot, but not as much as the Ukrainian people.
I hope that one day my son will understand that I did it for him and his sister, because I want to believe that Russia has a future as a free country" - " - Marina says. She confesses that the decision to protest during the live broadcast was spontaneous. She secretly made a poster on Sunday afternoon when her children went to visit her father, drawing it with the felt-tip pens of 11-year-old daughter Arina. On the "first channel" she carried him in the jacket sleeve.
"I was 90 percent convinced that nothing would work out. I thought I would surrender my nerves, or someone would stop me. I knew what risk I was going to, and knew that I would probably be imprisoned I thought it was the price worth paying . . . When the time came, I rushed to my office and grabbed a poster. I ran into the studio as soon as the dicctor started talking. My feet and hands trembled. I was blinded. It was beating. I didn't hear my words, "Ovsyannikov confesses.
Her speech lasted 6 seconds before panic -covered producers switched to a pre -recorded report, but it was too late. The video with Ovsyannikova dispersed around the world. The highest leadership went down to the editorial board to ask her questions. A few minutes before them were joined by police, who delivered it to the department, located at the Moscow TV center "Ostline".
She was told that she was threatening up to ten years in prison, and she decided to escape from house arrest with her 11-year-old daughter Arina. From there, she was taken to another compartment, where she was questioned by the investigator of the Center for Combating Extremism all night. She was not allowed to call a lawyer, saying it was "only a friendly conversation. " "He was constantly asking whom I was working for, who ordered the protest, who was paying me.
He could not believe that I was only one person who protests against the rinse of brains and lies, which is told on television about the war in Ukraine," - recalls Marina. , She said, they clearly did not understand how the successful editor of one of the central Russian channels with 25 years of work experience decided to protest. But Marina notes that in her childhood she survived the war and was a refugee.
She was born in Odessa, her father-Ukrainian, a Soviet maritime officer, died in a car crash when she was only five months old. When Marina was six years old, her mother, a chemical engineer, headed the laboratory of a refining plant in the Terrible. They were forced to flee when Russian tanks entered the Grozny at the beginning of the First Chechen War in 1994. Marina and her mother had nothing when they left Chechnya. They lived in an abandoned army barracks on the outskirts of Krasnodar.
Marina says that they lived in a gate, and at school they were bullied because she was the only refugee in the classroom. But she studied persistently in the late 1990s began working on the local Krasnodar TV channel "Kuban DTRK". During one of the first tasks, she even visited the Grozny and found her former apartment, which was completely destroyed. In 2002, she switched to the First Channel, where she met her husband, directed by Igor Ovsyannikov.
They married in two years, they had a son Cyril, they purchased a house in the Moscow region. "It was the family life that I once dreamed of, but a sense of anxiety about the price I paid for it," according to her after the War of 2008 in Georgia, "First Channel" and other Russian media turned Kremlin propaganda Machines, and this process accelerated when Russian troops invaded Ukraine in 2014.
She noted that she often argued with her husband about politics, and it clearly influenced their relationship, so they divorced in 2018. But from work she did not go for a prose cause - she needed money. "I did not see any alternative. I was able to give my children a child that I had not. But the turning point came when Russia began a full -scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year. Two cousins-Ukrainian sisters in Odessa asked her why the Russians were silent.
"After the invasion, I was shocked. It inspired horrible memories from my childhood. I was crazy. I couldn't help but act," she was released from the channel and fined 30 thousand rubles after the protest. She soon protested again and in August she was accused of spreading false information about the Russian army. In anticipation of the court, it was placed under house arrest and forced to wear an electronic bracelet. Her phones and computers were confiscated.
The decision to escape from Russia is not easy. She did not want to go without her daughter, but she left her father. Their super -secret escape was organized by the French charity organization "Reporters without borders" under the code name "Evelyn". Marina was asked not to reveal where she crossed the border to protect others. She left at midnight on Friday night when she was weakening. In the last minute they stood in the corridor with packed suitcases, her mother came.
"We had to hide the bags and inform the driver who was waiting for him to go and wait around the corner," she says. "My mother looked at the bracelet on my leg and said that I was a criminal and my place in prison. It was scary to hear it. She was completely washed with brains," says Marina. "She grew up in Soviet times. She believes that people in power are telling the truth.
I tried to talk to her, but she went out and closed the door," as soon as she went, Marina and her daughter got into the car and went. After a while, they changed the car and only then she remembered the bracelet. Which cut off with clippers. The next day, they arrived in the village, where they were replaced by cars and drivers, climbing into the old gray "Zhiguli", which took them to another village house, where the conductor said that they would take them to the border.
At night, they went fields, the car stuck in the mud. So they had to overcome the rest of the way. "It was quite dark. The field was plowed and we were constantly stumbling out. I was sure that one of us would break the leg and we would never pick up. It was like a horror movie: sometimes we saw light and fell to the ground.
Daughter was crying The conductor scolded me for white socks that could give us away, " - in four hours they were at the border and until the next conductor crawled under a barbed wire. They changed the cars twice and the night in a village house before they got a shelter, where they were met with "Reporters without borders". Marina Ovsyannikova says he will tell her story in the book "Between Good and Evil". She began to write to do something while she was hiding behind conspiratorial apartments.