Russian police raided the house of Marina Ovsyannikova, the former Russian state television producer who protested the war in Ukraine in a live news broadcast, the journalist said on Wednesday.
“At 6 in the morning while I was still sleeping, tens of employees of the Investigative Committee and the police stormed into my house. They showed an order for the raid,” Ovsyannikova said on the Telegram messaging app.
“They scared my little daughter. Now I am being taken to the Investigative Committee,” she added.
Ovsyannikova, 44, became well known in Russia and abroad in March after staging an anti-war picket during a primetime news broadcast on Russia’s state-controlled Channel One, where she was employed as a producer at the time.
Wednesday’s raids were linked to a criminal case on distributing “fakes” about the Russian Armed Forces, a criminal charge punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
The case was opened over Ovsyannikova’s solo protest near the Kremlin in July where she held a poster reading "How many more children must die [in Ukraine] before you stop?"
Dmitry Zakhvatov, a lawyer with the OVD-Info human rights watchdog who is representing Ovsyannikova, said the police started searching her home before her legal representative arrived.
Ovsyannikova has been fined twice before for her anti-war actions.
In July, Moscow’s Meshchansky District Court ordered her to pay 50,000 rubles ($816) for “discrediting” the Russian Armed Forces in an interview she gave during a trial against opposition politician Ilya Yashin.
Source https://www.globalcourant.com/russian-police-raid-house-of-state-tv-protester-ovsyannikova/?feed_id=8999&_unique_id=62f387cf14406
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