President Vladimir Putin of Russia fears nothing more than the truth. That’s why he suppresses it. That’s why he threatens, imprisons, or eliminates anyone who dares to speak it.
Yet even in the darkness of a dictatorship, truth finds daylight in unexpected places. During a live broadcast Monday on Russian state TV, a woman publicly defied Putin and called him out. She jumped on camera with a handmade sign written in two languages and adorned with both Russian and Ukrainian flags. “No war’’ and “Russians against war,’’ it said in English. “Stop the war. Don’t believe the propaganda,’’ it said in Russian. “They’re lying to you here.’’
Marina Ovsyannikova, who worked at Channel 1, understood the consequences of her unexpected appearance, and did it anyway. Earlier this month, Putin drastically increased penalties for whatever his government brands as “fake news,’’ including referring to his war against Ukraine as a war. Instead of a hefty fine, those convicted could now face up to 15 years in prison. Concerns over Putin’s extreme censorship laws convinced several Western media outlets to pull its reporters out of Russia. That means what passes for news in Russia is an uninterrupted diet of Putin-approved propaganda about the invasion, its phony motivations, and his once-lauded military.
But in a few seconds, one woman not only crashed a TV Russian show. She also pierced a hole in Putin’s bubble of lies.
“It sent shockwaves through all of Russian society,’’ Yakov Kronrod, an American in Russia trying to get his grandmother out of the country, told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Literally, it exploded. Everyone was texting each other, calling each other saying, ‘Did you see what happened?’ Many of the human rights activists I’m talking to feel this may very well be the start of the wave.’’
Channel 1 has millions of viewers. “For a lot of Russians,’’ Kronrod said, “this was the first time they saw any dissenting voices.’’ President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine also praised Ovsyannikova for “telling the truth.’’ After 14 hours in detention, Ovsyannikova appeared in a Moscow court Tuesday and was fined 30,000 rubles (about $280) for an antiwar video she made before her surprise TV appearance. She was found guilty of organizing an illegal protest and released.
In that video message, Ovsyannikova expressed her shame for spreading “Kremlin propaganda.’’ She said, “We Russians are thinking and intelligent people. It’s in our power alone to stop all this madness. Go protest. Don’t be afraid of anything. They can’t lock us all away.’’
Of course, Putin will try. Since his invasion of Ukraine began last month, more than 15,000 Russian protesters have been detained. Some have been beaten on the streets, yet they continue to show their opposition to Putin because truth trumps fear. Putin’s fake narrative for war has unraveled right along with his image as a cunning strongman and military mastermind.
Putin’s war against Ukraine is now in its third week, at least two weeks longer than Putin probably anticipated. With his inflated sense of self, he expected Ukrainians to cower, and their cities to collapse in the face of overwhelming Russian might. By now, he might have imagined himself as a conquering hero walking through Ukraine, each step bringing him closer to his warped dream of a Soviet Union restored through violent subjugation.
But with every horror committed against Ukrainian civilians, Putin shows his own weakness. On NBC News, a woman identified as Nina took a reporter through the shattered remnants of her small Kyiv apartment after the building was devastated by a Russian missile. She emerged uninjured — and resolute. She said she felt pity for Putin’s mother, “who is turning in her grave that she gave birth to such a nasty bastard.’’
For more than two decades, Putin has ruled in Russia with a clenched fist. He has garnered the fawning adoration of fanboys like Donald Trump. During a recent appearance on ABC’s “The View,’’ Stephanie Grisham, Trump’s former White House press secretary, said Trump admired Putin because “I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him,’’ a credible accusation repeatedly leveled against the Russian president.
Putin has long represented an autocrat wannabe’s idea of power through intimidation and suppression. But he has never before encountered anything like Ukrainians armed with purpose, Molotov cocktails, and their most potent weapon, truth. Or, for that matter, once-compliant Russians now willing to defy Putin by turning his propaganda tools against him to call his war a war and expose the coward behind his crumbling strongman myth.