Sitting inside the headquarters of RSF (Reporters Sans Frontières, or Reporters Without Borders), Ekaterina Barabash is cheerful but clearly exhausted. A few days ago the 63-year-old journalist arrived in the French capital after a daring and highly dangerous escape from house arrest in Moscow.
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Her clandestine journey was long and complex; she travelled more than 2,800km under the radar to reach Paris. Thibault Bruttin, RSF's Director General, said that several times they believed Barabash had been arrested, and that once they thought she was dead.
At a small press conference on Monday, Barabash laughingly brushed aside praise of her courage as she recounted how she sawed off her electronic ankle tag and fled into the forest while disguised. “I'm a very optimistic person,” she smiled. “If I’ve decided, everything will be alright.”
Foreign agent
A Russian court had placed Barabash under house arrest in February pending trial on charges of “disseminating false information” after the journalist published Facebook posts lambasting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, posting photographs of buildings and parks destroyed by Russian bombing and denouncing the lives lost.
On April 4, the Russian Ministry of Justice designated her a “foreign agent”. Later that month, facing up to 10 years in prison, she fled and was officially listed as “wanted” by the Russian state on April 21.
Born during the Soviet era in the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, she moved with her family to Moscow, where she grew up. A culture journalist and film critic, she worked for independent Russian media outlet Republic, and before that the Russian language service of Radio France Internationale. Her ties to Ukraine stayed strong: Barabash has a son and grandson living in Kyiv whom she hasn’t seen in more than three years.
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“When I worried about missiles hitting their house I was close to death,” she says. Barabash felt compelled to write anti-war content fully aware it could lead to her arrest, as it indeed did when she arrived back in Russia from the Berlinale international film festival in Berlin. Bruttin said Barabash’s ordeal “shows that every journalist – even though they might consider themselves out of harm’s way because they report on culture or cinema – every journalist is under surveillance and could be repressed by the Kremlin”, adding: “There is no journalism in Russia.”
Precise details of her exfiltration are being kept a tightly guarded secret so as not to reveal the back channels used and to protect the network of volunteers who helped her flee, but in conversation with FRANCE 24’s Catherine Norris Trent, Barabash revealed more about her escape and the heart-breaking decisions behind it.
FRANCE 24: Why were you arrested? Why were you targeted, do you think?
I was arrested because in the beginning of the war the Russian dictator issued a law, the main point of which is that that now if you write “fakes” about Russian army, for example, that [the] Russian army is killing Ukrainian people and Ukrainian children, you face up to 10 years in jail. I like my profession, journalism, very much. I love my children who are in Kyiv, so I couldn't… It hurts something in your organism, you cry, you say something loudly, I couldn't keep silent. They arrested me for this, for “fakes”, for “fakes” about the Russian army.
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I couldn't keep silent. A lot of people tried to prevent me, saying "It's very dangerous. Please don't write in this, in such a way." But when it hurts, it's impossible to keep silent. And it was hurting all the time. And it's hurting now. Every morning, I wake up and the first thing I do is write to my son. I look at Ukrainian media – are there some missiles, Shahed? – and so on. Some friends of my son and his wife were killed during this war. So how could a normal person be silent?
You were arrested for posts on Facebook?
Yes. They have chosen the three strongest ones, where I said that I hate the Russian army, that they are killers. I published photos of destroyed buildings and so on. "You are destroying the system," they told me in the police station. Me? "You are destroying our system." I am a small woman. How can a small woman destroy such a system with three small posts?
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I knew that authorities might catch me, but I was just hoping that there were a lot more important people in Russia for them to follow and search for. Frankly speaking, I thought "it will be as it will be."
When were you arrested, what happened then?
There was a search at my home, quite a light search, only in my room. They opened some boxes, took my smartphone, my laptop. Later, they took me to the police station. I was told I was under house arrest, which was very unexpected. If not, there wouldn't have been any possibility to escape.
Tell us about your escape. What happened? You left in a taxi?
I said goodbye to my mother and her helper, who lives with her. A taxi was ordered by somebody one or two blocks away from my house and he took me to the point where my organiser told me to go.
Then I changed cars and we began our long adventure. The police found the taxi but nothing else. So they understood where I was going. Then they went to see my friends, my family, my brother. Once they told them, "We have found her, it’s ok." But that was an absolute lie, a provocation.
You disguised yourself when you left. How did you disguise yourself?
The organisers told me to put on some clothes which nobody [had seen] before, but I don't have many, so I put on a dark coat, I put on dark glasses, I pulled up my hood and I went out. I had just a strange look, such a strange woman. It was raining, it was a dark morning, and here was a woman going out wearing dark glasses!
How difficult was your escape? It could have been dangerous at any moment.
Yes, sure. It was very dangerous, it was frightening. Because there are cameras everywhere. And sometimes it was difficult physically, because I had to walk for many kilometres through the forest with my backpack. Sometimes I didn't have an apartment to sleep in at night so I had to sleep under the sky, and so on.
Can you explain why you had to do that?
Why did I escape? There was a clear reason I escaped: because I didn't want to be in prison. Its really something. A Russian prison is worse than death. That's why I even began looking to get some poison because there was no way I could go to prison for five or seven years.
To leave some of your family behind, including your mother who is 96, must have been a very difficult decision to make...
Yes, sure. It was the most difficult decision in my life. It was very difficult. I cannot even explain. And you know, we were very close. I was very close to my parents. We were best friends together with my father. And so we were always together. I understood that it would be a great sorrow to leave my mother and not to see her again. But she understood that my exile would be much better than jail..
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We would have been divided in any case but it’s one thing to be in exile in some good European country with regular connection and another thing to be in jail where you have only three minutes a week to speak on the telephone with the presence of security telling you "Don't say this, don't say that."
What would you say to the world about the state of Russian journalism today? Is it still possible to have journalists in Russia?
Formally, yes. There are a lot of newspapers, magazines – political, social, cultural, glamour and so on. But censorship destroyed journalism. State censorship made honest journalism impossible. So if you want to be a journalist, you have to go into exile. If you want to stay in Russia as a journalist, you are not a journalist. It's very simple.
This interview has been at times abbreviated and re-ordered for clarity.
English (US) · 