Journalist Ekaterina Barabash was under house arrest in Moscow for 'telling the truth about the war in Ukraine'. Rather than risk a decade in Putin's prisons she chose to flee, crossing the forests of Belarus alone. Having been in Paris for two months now, she spoke to RFI about leaving everything behind and building a new life, and why she had no choice but to defend the dignity of her profession.
Barabash still finds it hard to believe she's living in Paris. "I ask my son sometimes, do you really think that now I live in Paris?" she says, speaking from the offices of Reporters Without Borders (RSF) – the press freedom NGO that helped organise her extradition from Moscow. "For me it still feels a bit unreal. It's something like a dream."
The knock on the door came on 25 February, shortly after the 64-year-old Russian journalist returned from reporting at the Berlin Film Festival. Detained for a day and stripped of her electronic devices, she was then placed under house arrest on 21 April, and was facing up to 10 years in prison for criticising Russia's war in Ukraine.
Her crime was writing "the truth about this war" on Facebook, she says. After Russia introduced its draconian "fake news" law in 2022, making it effectively illegal to criticise the military, authorities began monitoring Barabash's posts. One, written in March 2022, described how Russia had "bombed the country" and "razed whole cities to the ground".
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Ties to Ukraine
For Barabash, a film critic who has spent decades writing about cinema, speaking out wasn't just her professional duty – it was deeply personal. Born in Kharkiv when it was part of the Soviet Union, she has strong family ties to Ukraine. Her son has lived there for 17 years, and her late father was a renowned Ukrainian literature expert who wrote openly against the war before his death last November.
"If there were not my personal links with Ukraine, if I didn't imagine each night how the missiles are attacking my son's house, maybe I would have been quieter," she said.
Her transformation from culture journalist to wanted dissident began long before Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022. As Russia's aggression toward Ukraine escalated, she found herself unable to separate art from politics.
"When the war began – not this invasion in February 2022 but before that, after Crimea and the first attacks on the east of Ukraine, [that] was the beginning of the war – that's the moment I understood that it wasn't possible to write only about culture. Culture is very tightly connected with politics."
She cites a Russian saying: "If you don't [take an] interest in politics, politics will [take an interest] in you."
After her lawyers gave her an estimated 50-80 percent chance of imprisonment, Barabash made the decision to flee. She was approached by a network of volunteers – "some Russian people in exile and some Russian people in Russia" – who had helped others, including TV journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, to escape.
"They found a way to me and proposed to help me escape. They said that if I agree, they'll prepare all the operation," she said.
The escape began with a car ride from Moscow to Belarus, driven by a volunteer who then returned to Russia, leaving her alone to follow encrypted instructions. For the most dangerous part of her journey, she went completely offline. "I turned off all the equipment and I was without any connection for almost 10 days. I didn't know if my mother, my family, my friends, knew where I was," she recalls.
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'It's difficult to scare me'
Her route to freedom took her through the forests of Belarus, sleeping rough for nights on end, guided only by encrypted messages from anonymous volunteers. At times, she admits, the journey felt more dangerous than staying in Russia to face trial.
"I had to sleep in the forest, in the fields," she recalls. "I understood only afterwards that it was very dangerous. But at the time I didn't think about it. I had my freedom, that's all."
Sleeping rough in forests was challenging for a woman in her sixties, but Barabash had forged a lot of inner strength. "I'm a strong Russian woman. I'm a former sportswoman," she says, referring to her background in gymnastics. "So it's very, very difficult to scare me. It's my character."
The journey took two and a half weeks, with RSF coordinating the final stages. The NGO's director Thibaut Bruttin later admitted the organisation had feared the worst several times: "Once, we thought she was dead."
Barabash crossed into European Union territory on 26 April, her 64th birthday. "I crossed the border illegally. But there were people who helped me on the other side of the border. And then people from RSF came and took me to Paris."
'A symbol of hope'
The transition hasn't been easy. "I came with this, with my backpack," she says, pointing to a small bag on the floor. "And so for a few days after my arrival here, I was wearing my friends' clothes."
The separation from her family, too, is hard. Her 96-year-old mother remains in Moscow, while her son and grandson are trapped in Ukraine. "I left everything – my property, my family, my mother. I see the pictures of my previous life and I try to close them in my mind. It's very dramatic, but I am trying to be involved in this life, in France."
RSF is helping her claim political asylum and she lives with a good Russian-born friend. Unable to work legally in France, she writes a little for Russian-language media based elsewhere in Europe.
"I'm a strong Russian woman, a former sportswoman. It's very, very difficult to scare me."
Ekaterina Barabash
RSF has described her as a "symbol of hope" but she shakes her head at this. For her, proper Russian journalists are now either in jail or living in exile, while the others consider her "as a symbol of stupidity".
"They say, why? You have such an old mother, you have property, you should be silent. We are against the war, but we are keeping silent. You'll end up in prison."
As a journalist she felt obliged to break that silence. "The journalist profession is... for those who have to say the truth. And especially in such dark times as now in Russia."
Does she have any regrets?
"Je ne regrette rien," she says, quoting Edith Piaf. "I was saving my dignity. The dignity of my profession." She adds that if even one person read her articles and it helped them to change their mind about the war, then it was worth it.
