A former Russian state television journalist who protested against Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine during a live broadcast has reportedly fled the country after she landed on a wanted list.
"[Marina] Ovsyannikova and her daughter left Russia a few hours after departing from the address where she was under house arrest. They are in Europe now," Ovsyannikova's lawyer, Dmitry Zakhvatov, told the Guardian.
"They are fine. They are waiting until they can talk about publicly, but for now it is not safe," he added.
Ovsyannikova, former editor at Channel One, made headlines in March after interrupting a broadcast of its flagship Vremya (Time) evening news, holding a poster reading, "No war."
She was placed under house arrest after she held a lone protest in mid-July near the Kremlin carrying a placard that read: "Putin is a murderer. His soldiers are fascists."
Ovsyannikova, 44, was charged with distributing information about the Russian armed forces deemed by the government to be false – a charge that could lead to a 10-year prison sentence, the Guardian reported.
Her lawyer previously said Ovsyannikova had been put on Russia's wanted list for having evaded arrest.
Ovsyannikova recorded a video before her on-air protest where she apologized for participating in "Kremlin propaganda," The Hill noted.
"I'm very ashamed of it — that I let people lie from TV screens and allowed the Russian people to be zombified," she said in the video.
She told CNN in March a "cognitive dissonance" between her beliefs and what she was compelled to say on television motivated her to make a viral statement.
"The war was the point of no return," she said. "I realized that I either would need to do something or we would reach a point of no return and it would be more and more difficult to do anything.
"I wanted to show to the world that Russians are against the war, the majority of Russians."
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