'I took my laptop, three lipsticks and a can of hairspray': how I fled Moscow

The Russian film critic Ekaterina Barabash tells Kim Willsher in Paris how she was forced to leave her homeland, family and friends or face years in prison after denouncing the invasion of Ukraine

- Kim Willsher

As the car sped through the Russian countryside, Ekaterina Barabash attacked the electronic tag around her ankle with a hacksaw and threw it out of the window.

"I sawed it off and it went into one of Russia's forests," the 64-year-old journalist says, laughing. It is easy to make light of the incident now that she is safe in Paris, but Barabash's escape from house arrest in Moscow was as daring as it was dangerous.

Her 2,800km journey, by road, air and on foot, took her across four borders from Moscow to Paris, including a two-week period when she was forced to hide in a forest, "sleeping in the middle of nowhere".

For most of her life Barabash, a film critic and cultural journalist, had no reason to imagine she would be forced to flee Putin's Russia. But Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 changed everything. Born in Kharkiv and with a grown-up son, Yurii, living in Kyiv with his wife, she was unable to remain silent.

"So, you bastards, you've bombed Ukraine, razed entire towns to the ground, killed a hundred children, shot peaceful people, kept Mariupol under blockade, deprived millions of people of a normal life, forced them to go abroad..." she wrote in one Facebook post.

"I was writing about how I hated the Russian invasion and that I hated the Russian army that was killing people. The situation was harder for me, as my son and his family were living in Kyiv and I could imagine the missiles falling on them. I was worried to death," she told The Observer.