Facing a 10-year prison sentence for speaking out against the war, Ekaterina Barabash was kept under house arrest in Moscow.
After disappearing on 21 April – and fears she may have died – she resurfaced yesterday in the French capital, where she detailed her escape from Russia.
With the help of Reporters Without Borders, also known by its French acronym of RSF, she tore off her electronic tag and navigated more than 2,800km using “clandestine routes” to evade surveillance.
“Her escape was one of the most perilous operations RSF has been involved in since Russia’s draconian laws of March 2022,” said the group’s director, Thibaut Bruttin, referring to legislation outlawing any public expression about the war going against the official government narrative.
“At one point, we thought she might be dead.”
‘There is only war’
In her first remarks since finding freedom, Barabash, 63, said: “There is no culture in Russia… there is no politics… it’s only war.”
She added the very concept of a “Russian journalist” no longer made sense, saying it cannot exist “under totalitarianism”.
The Facebook posts that landed her in trouble were written between 2022 and 2023, as they railed against Russia’s actions in Ukraine.
One post read: “So you (expletive) bombed the country, razed entire cities to the ground, killed a hundred children, shot civilians for no reason, blockaded Mariupol, deprived millions of people of a normal life and forced them to leave for foreign countries? All for the sake of friendship with Ukraine?”
Russian authorities arrested her upon her return from the Berlinale film festival in February.
She was charged with spreading “false information” and branded a “foreign agent”.
Barabash was then put under house arrest, until she disappeared last month.
The escape
Barabash said she crossed several borders and used covert channels orchestrated by RSF.
She spent two weeks in hiding and reached France on 26 April, her birthday.
The most difficult part was knowing she’d be leaving her 96-year-old mother behind.
“I just understood that I’d never see her,” she said, adding they both decided not seeing her while being free was better than a Russian prison.
Barabash’s son and grandson remain in Kyiv, but she hasn’t been able to see them since the war started because “I have a Russian passport”, she said.