Ekaterina Barabash, a Russian journalist who was arrested earlier this year for speaking out against the war in Ukraine, has escaped house arrest and is now wanted by police, Russian state media reported on April 21.
Barabash, 63, was initially detained by the Russian Investigative Committee, a law enforcement agency tasked with investigating serious federal crimes, on Feb. 25.
The Russian Investigative Committee claimed in a Telegram post on February 26 that Barabash "admitted her guilt in full" during an interrogation.
She was then placed under house arrest by a Moscow court for posting "fake news" on her Facebook account about the war in Ukraine and was expected to stay there until April 25.
Russian authorities were alerted to her disappearance on April 13 by an electronic monitoring system. "The accused has been declared wanted," Russian state media reported.
Barabash has Ukrainian heritage and is the mother-in-law of Ukrainian screenwriter Lyuba Yakimchuk. She is also the daughter of late Ukrainian-born literary scholar and Shevchenko Prize laureate Yuriy Barabash.
For years, Barabash has publicly supported Ukraine on her social media accounts and condemned Russia's full-scale invasion.
“(You) bastards bomb a country, raze entire cities to the ground, kill hundreds of children, shoot at peaceful people for no reason, keep Mariupol under a blockade, deprive millions of people of a normal life, and force them to leave for foreign countries. For what? For the sake of friendship with Ukraine? You are Evil on a planetary scale," Barabash wrote on Facebook.
Since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russia has cracked down on dissent and freedom of expression, specifically targeting people who have been critical of the war. Thousands of Russian citizens have been arrested and jailed for speaking out against the Putin regime.
Kateryna Hodunova
