Marina Ovsyannikova, a former Russian TV journalist who grabbed world attention when she flared into a news broadcast with a placard that read “Stop the war” and “They’re lying to you”, was sentenced on Wednesday in absentia to eight and half years in prison.
Ovsyannikova was fined for her earliest protest, less than three weeks after Russia raided Ukraine on February 24, 2022, in what it called a “special military operation”.
But she later encountered criminal prosecution for “spreading knowingly false information about the Russian Armed Forces” in link with a July 2022 protest when she stood on a river embankment opposite the Kremlin and had a poster calling President Vladimir Putin a killer and his fighters fascists.
“How many more children must die before you will stop?” the poster read.
Ovsyannikova escaped Russia with her daughter for an unknown European nation a year ago after fleeing from house arrest, according to her lawyer, saying she had no case to answer.
The case against her was taken under laws passed soon after Russia’s attack that made it an offense to “discredit” the armed forces or disseminate inaccurate information about them.
Ovsyannikova posted a statement on Telegram on the eve of the judgment in which she called the accusations “absurd and politically motivated”.
“Of course I don’t admit my guilt,” she wrote. “And I don’t retract a single word.”
