A Russian state television employee who stormed a live broadcast on Monday was interrogated by the police for 14 hours and fined by a Moscow court on Tuesday.
“I spent two days without sleep,” the woman, Marina Ovsyannikova, said in a video recorded outside of the courtroom on Tuesday by Mediazona, an online news site.
“I wasn’t allowed to contact my relatives or people close to me,” Ms. Ovsyannikova said, adding that she was not allowed “access to any legal representation, so I was in a fairly difficult position.”
Ms. Ovsyannikova, who worked for Channel 1 in Moscow, was detained on Monday after she burst onscreen during a popular news show, yelling, “Stop the war!” and holding up a sign that read, “They’re lying to you here.”
Immediately after, a Russian human rights group named OVD-Info circulated a prerecorded video in which Ms. Ovsyannikova said she was “deeply ashamed” to have helped make “Kremlin propaganda.”
The fine issued Tuesday was for that video, not the on-air protest. Ms. Ovsyannikova was charged with organizing an unauthorized public event and fined the equivalent of about $273, according to Sergey Badamshin, the chairman of a Moscow bar association. The protest may cost her more dearly.
Tass, a state publication, reported that Ms. Ovsyannikova was being investigated for violating Russia’s new “false information” law, which carries a sentence of up to 15 years in prison for anyone convicted of disseminating news about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that goes against the Kremlin’s official narrative. Mr. Badamshin confirmed that the investigation was underway.
Dmitri Peskov, the spokesman for President Vladimir V. Putin, said at a news conference Tuesday that what “this woman did is hooliganism.”
Ms. Ovsyannikova got a much warmer response from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. In a televised address Tuesday, he expressed gratitude for “that woman who walked in the studio of Channel One with a poster against the war.”
