Almost a year after opposing the war in Ukraine during a newscast on state television, journalist Marina Ovsiannikova has released an autobiographical book describing, among other things, the media "propaganda factory" of Moscow, which she ended up running away.

The book appears Friday, February 10 in Germany.

The same day, she will give a press conference in Paris at the offices of Reporters sans Frontières to recount her escape from Russia with her daughter thanks to RSF, four months ago, when she was under house arrest.

Entitled "Zwischen Gut und Böse" ("Between good and evil, how I finally stood against the Kremlin's propaganda", Ed. Langen Müller), this 200-page book should also be released later in English and French. , Marina Ovsiannikova's German publisher told AFP.

At the beginning of this book, the journalist born to a Russian mother and a Ukrainian father recalls her irruption, a few days after the outbreak of the Russian invasion, during the country's most watched television news, with a sign proclaiming "No War".

>> See also, the Interview of France 24: Marina Ovsiannikova, Russian journalist: "I am not part of the scum"

Her intervention – which she writes that she decided on her own because she could no longer bear the lies of the regime – upset her professional and family life.

A book that describes tricks of the Russian "propaganda factory"

It is essentially this period of a few months that she describes in her book, with flashbacks to her childhood in Grozny, the capital of the Russian Caucasian republic of Chechnya, and her early career.

She does not deny having been part of the system: her husband, from whom she has since been separated and with whom she had a son and a daughter, is part of the executives of the television channel Russia Today. 

She also describes some tricks of the "propaganda factory" of her employer, Pervy Kanal: the dissemination of information about Vladimir Putin should never be followed by bad news.

He is presented as the savior of Russia. 

On the other hand, there is a latent ban on spreading good news from the United States and Western Europe.

In the minds of Russians, the image must be transmitted that all Americans support the LGBT movement, kill black people, abuse adopted Russian children, she writes.

Her book ends with her clandestine escape from Russia, when she crosses the Russian border on foot with her daughter, without it being specified in which country she arrives.

At the end, she describes herself in a car in Paris, on the way to the RSF office, "whose contribution to our escape was truly borderless in every way".

With AFP

The summary of the

France 24 week invites you to come back to the news that marked the week

I subscribe

Take international news everywhere with you!

Download the France 24 app