Marina Ovsyannikova

Marina Vladimirovna Ovsyannikova (Мари́на Влади́мировна Овся́нникова, ; Tkachuk (Ткачу́к); born 19 June 1978) is a Russian journalist who was employed on the Channel One Russia television channel.

Ovsyannikova was born on 19 June 1978 in Odesa, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union.

Her mother is Russian, and her father is Ukrainian.

She lived with her mother in Grozny until the start of the Chechen War, but then they moved to Krasnodar.

As a child, she practiced swimming and artistic gymnastics.

Her swimming team won the university level Krasnodar championship competitions.

Ovsyannikova graduated from the Kuban State University and later from the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA).

She worked for the All-Russia State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company (VGTRK).

Since 1997, she was a journalist and news presenter for the "Kuban" TV channel (a regional subsidiary of VGTRK), and a favorite of its head Vladimir Runov, who is claimed to have helped her enter RANEPA.

She worked for Russia's main evening newscast Vremya on Channel One since the beginning of the 2000s, later describing her role as "producing Kremlin propaganda".

In March 2022, she interrupted a broadcast of Vremya to protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which made international news headlines.

She was arrested, held without access to her lawyer, fined 30,000 rubles (280 dollars at the time), and later released.

As of early October 2022, she is wanted by the Russian justice system after escaping her pre-trial house arrest; her lawyer says that she fled to Europe.

In February 2023, it was revealed she had fled to Paris, France with her daughter.

In 2003, after moving to Moscow, she was hired by Channel One Russia.

Politico wrote: "Since 2003, her job was to watch Western news streams and press conferences, and collect excerpts that made the West look bad and Russia look good".

The Telegraph described Ovsyannikova during her time at Channel One as a "state mouthpiece" and "the flesh and blood of the Kremlin's propaganda machine".

Ovsyannikova retroactively described herself as "having spent many years producing Kremlin propaganda" while working for Channel One.

Ovsyannikova initially supported Putin, but images of the war in Ukraine brought back memories of the war she experienced as a child in Chechnya.

She had planned to protest near the Kremlin, but later decided it was not very useful.

On 14 March 2022, during a live broadcast related to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on the evening news programme Vremya, which had millions of viewers, she appeared behind the news anchor, Ekaterina Andreeva, carrying a poster stating in a mix of Russian and English:

"🇺🇦 No War 🇷🇺 Остановите войну не верьте пропаганде здесь вам врут [Stop the war, don't believe the propaganda, here you are being lied to.] Russians against war"

Ovsyannikova shouted:

"Остановите войну! Нет войне!

[Stop the war!

No war!]"

After a few seconds, the broadcast cut away to a recorded segment.

The recording of the news program was not available for download, which is uncommon for this TV channel.

The protest was unusual as the state-operated program does not deviate from the Kremlin line of a "special military operation", and viewers had previously not been told that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a war.

After Ovsyannikova's on-air protest, Russian human rights group OVD-Info posted a video she had pre-recorded on Telegram.

In the video, she stated that she was "ashamed of working for Kremlin propaganda":

"What is happening in Ukraine is a crime. Russia is an aggressor country and the responsibility for this aggression rests on the conscience of only one person. That person is Vladimir Putin. My father is Ukrainian, my mother is Russian, and they've never been enemies. This necklace I'm wearing is a symbol of that fact that Russia must immediately end this fratricidal war and our fraternal peoples will still be able to reconcile. Unfortunately, I've spent the last few years working for Channel One, doing Kremlin propaganda, and I'm very ashamed of this. Ashamed that I allowed lies to be broadcast from TV screens. Ashamed that I allowed others to zombify Russian people. We were silent in 2014 when all this started. We didn't protest when the Kremlin poisoned Navalny. We just silently watched this inhuman regime at work. And now the whole world has turned its back on us. And the next ten generations won't wash away the stain of this fratricidal war.

We Russians are thinking and intelligent people.

It's in our power alone to stop all this madness.

Go protest.

Don't be afraid of anything.

They can't lock us all away."

Clips of Ovsyannikova's protest were widely shared around the world and attracted substantial global media coverage.

Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy thanked Ovsyannikova during one of his broadcasts.

French president Emmanuel Macron offered Ovsyannikova protection at the French embassy or through asylum.