The woman is called Marina Ovsyannikova and has been working in the broadcaster for years. In a pre-recorded video, shared via social media scatteredShe says that she is ashamed of the propaganda spread by Channel One and that she has cooperated for a long time. It invites people to protest. “They can’t lock us all up.” Ovsiannikova also says that her father is Ukrainian and her mother is Russian.

“This is a private business, which can only be done by someone who works there,” says correspondent Geert Grote-Korkamp from Moscow. “You can’t just enter from the outside.” According to Groot Koerkamp, ​​it rarely happens that television employees themselves take action in the studio. “We saw this many times in the last days of the Soviet Union. And in 2011, the presenter of the NTV station refused to read the news if there was no interest in the mass demonstrations that took place in Moscow at that time.”

Ovsiannikova was arrested shortly after the accident. According to the Russian human rights organization Agora, she is being held in a police station in Moscow. The Russian state news agency TASS wrote that the woman faces a prison sentence of up to 15 years. Russia recently passed a law that severely punishes the spread of “false information” about the war in Ukraine.

Her act garnered a lot of attention on social media and her bravery was praised: