A Russian TV editor who interrupted a live broadcast to challenge Vladimir Putin over his bloody war in Ukraine has made a daring escape from Russia to France. Marina Obsianikova, 44, born in Ukraine, made headlines a year ago when she stood in front of the cameras of Channel One with a sign that read: “No war. Stop the war. Don’t believe the propaganda. Russians against war.”
She was put on the country’s red list and placed under house arrest in August in connection with another incident in which she held a banner reading “Killer tyrant and his fascist soldiers. The Russian regime accused her of spreading fake news about Russia’s armed forces, a “crime” for which she could have been sentenced to 10 years in a colony Russian Penalty.
But instead of waiting for the almost certain verdict, Marina fled her homeland with her daughter in a daring escape to Paris. Both now live in the French capital after President Emmanuel Macron gave them political asylum and round-the-clock security.
In a conversation from Paris with the Daily Mail, she said: “I know all too well what can happen to the enemies of the Kremlin. But there are more and more of us who are speaking out. Putin cannot silence us all.”
Last October, she decided to cut her electronic handcuffs with a wire cutter hidden in her handbag and set off on a getaway with her 11-year-old daughter Arisha, changing cars seven times before they reached the border. While awaiting trial, she was placed under house arrest and forced to wear the electronic handcuff linked to police stations, her phones and computers confiscated.
The decision to flee Russia was not taken lightly. She says she would never have considered leaving without her daughter, but last October, Arisha ran away from her father and took a taxi to her mother’s house. “I knew we had to take the opportunity and go,” she said.
Their top-secret escape was orchestrated by the charity 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 a Friday night last October, a day when Russia’s security forces are less active. “I knew they would be less likely to notice as soon as I left,” she said. At the last moment, when they were standing in the corridor with their suitcases packed, her mother arrived. “We had to hide the bags and tell the driver waiting outside to go and wait around the corner.”
“My mother stared at the cuff on my leg and told me that I was a criminal and that I deserved to go to jail. It was devastating to hear her say that. She is completely brainwashed. She grew up in the Soviet era. She believes that people in power are telling the truth. I tried to talk to her but she walked out and slammed the door.”
After she left, Marina and Arisha ran to the waiting car with their bags. A few kilometers down the road they changed cars. It was at this stage that she was still wearing her electronic handcuff.
“I took the wire cutters out of my bag. It was hard to cut it but after a few tries it came off. I threw it out the car window.” Both mother and daughter fell asleep while driving during the night. The next day, they arrived at a village where they changed cars and drivers again, and climbed into a vehicle that took them to another village house, where a guide arrived to take them to the border.
At one point, one of the vehicles became useless after getting stuck in the mud, and the two had to walk for miles across waterlogged fields and forests, using the stars to navigate their way to the border because they had no cell phone reception. As they crawled under barbed wire fences, they were forced to lie down on the ground in several cases to avoid the spotlights of the border guards.
“The headlights of another car were waiting for us in the distance,” she continued to describe. After switching cars again, they set off across a field, but as the car bounced up and down, the trunk opened and one of their backpacks fell out. “We stopped to pick him up, but the car was stuck in the mud and wouldn’t move.”
The driver of Marina’s car turned off his headlights and told his passengers to run down the path. Marina knew that at some point they would have to cross the border on foot, but nothing could have prepared her for the hours that followed. “It was pitch black, the field was plowed and we kept tripping in ditches, I was sure one of us would break a leg and we’d never get out. It was like a horror movie. Sometimes there were lights and we had to keep throwing ourselves down to avoid being seen. The guide kept yelling at me to cover my socks My whites, Arisha was crying and I had to keep pushing her.”
“I was so exhausted that I started to think it would be better to go back and face going to prison, to do this journey with a girl was absolutely horrible,” she told the Daily Mail. “Sometimes I didn’t think we would make it. But it wasn’t safe to stay in Russia. The authorities would throw me in jail. They wanted to destroy me.” She also said: “I know too well what can happen to the enemies of the Kremlin. But there are more and more of us who are speaking out. Putin cannot silence us all.”
After several hours, they entered the forest where their next contact signaled them with a flashlight to reach him, they crawled through a barbed wire, dragging their suitcases. Even though she knew she was no longer on Russian soil, she still couldn’t feel relief. “I knew that at any moment we could be found and forced to return.”
They continued with their guide, and finally reached a car that took them to a safe house in the village, where an elderly woman helped them and gave them food, before they set off again, this time in a different vehicle as they reached another safe house. There they changed cars for the last time, drove into the city, where representatives of the Reporters Without Borders organization were waiting for them.
Marina and Arisha received 24-hour security due to incidents in which Putin harmed Russian citizens outside of Russia, including the 2018 poisoning of agents Sergei and Yulia Skripal in the UK, and the 2006 killing of agent Alexander Litvinenko also in the UK. But they still had to keep moving while in Paris, changing apartment after apartment for fear of Putin’s long hand.
Her decision also had huge consequences in relation to her personal life, the loss of friends, her home, her job and family members, such as her son Kirill, 17, who refuses to speak to her. After her protests, her ex-husband and the father of her children filed for custody, claiming she was unfit to care for them.
Her mother told her she was a shame to her country and turned her back on her. So did her ex-husband, an executive at a pro-Putin TV channel with whom she remained on good terms until she spoke out against the invasion of Ukraine.
She admits that her decisions have changed her life, but she says that her loss is not as close as the suffering of the Ukrainian people. She said that she hopes her son will one day see why she chose these decisions, I hope that one day, when Putin is gone, I will be able to hug my mother again,” she added.