Barabash is the daughter of late literary scholar Yuriy Barabash. Russia has detained journalist and film critic Ekaterina Barabash in Moscow, her son and local media reported. Ms Barabash, who is the daughter of late literary scholar Yuriy Barabash and mother-in-law of screenwriter Lyuba Yakimchuk, was detained on Tuesday by the Russian Investigative Committee – the main federal investigating authority in Russia – a day after Ukraine marked three years of Russian invasion, according to reports.
The charges and circumstances of her arrest were unknown but it was "likely related to her professional activities", her son Yuri Barabash wrote on Facebook. However, The Moscow Times quoted the Investigative Committee as saying in a statement on the Telegram messaging app that, “The defendant was investigated and charged. During the interrogation, she admitted guilt in full”. It quoted the Moscow police as saying that she was accused of spreading “deliberately false information” about the Russian armed forces.
Ms Barabash works for a Russian publication, Republic, which was added to the foreign agent media register and banned in 2022, shortly after Vladimir Putin's forces invaded Ukraine. She has been a vocal critic of Russia's invasion and publicly supported Ukraine on her social media.
On the third anniversary of the war, Ms Barabash said on Facebook that lives had turned upside down because of the invasion. "It feels like a whole lifetime has passed in these three years, one I never asked for. There is no place in it for anything but anxiety for my children and hatred, hatred, hatred for those who started all this," she wrote in Russian.
She was fired from the Russian Interfax news agency in 2016 for criticising the Kremlin, The Kyiv Independent reported. Her detention comes amid the Kremlin's aggressive crackdown on dissent and anti-war protesters since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
Last December, a local court announced a 16-year-old girl was in pre-trial detention in St Petersburg for putting up posters of anti-establishment fighters on a bulletin board at her school. A court in Russia’s Kursk border region in January issued an arrest warrant for Jerome Starkey, defence editor at The Sun, and put him on an international wanted list. The Kursk regional court accused him of illegally crossing the border into Russia.
