A Russian TV journalist who interrupted a live broadcast to protest the war in Ukraine has been detained, with her lawyers not allowed to contact her.

An Editor at Russia’s Channel One, Marina Ovsyannikova, walked onto set and held up a sign to the camera protesting President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine during the news on Monday night.

The poster also said that Russian viewers were being lied to by the government about the war in Ukraine. 

A day after the incident, European Commission spokesperson, Peter Stano, said on Tuesday that Ms Ovsyannikova “took a brave moral stance…to object to the Kremlin’s lies and propaganda live on air on a state-controlled TV channel.”

Mr Stano added that the channel’s chief executive was one of the regime’s “chief propagandists.” 

“The state apparatus continues its oppression against the domestic opposition, against the domestic peace-loving population, denying them their basic rights and freedoms such as freedom of opinion and freedom of expression,” Mr Stano said.

The Kremlin condemned the woman’s actions as hooliganism, with spokesman Dmitry Peskov cited by the Interfax news agency as saying that the matter was for the broadcaster itself to settle.

Ms Ovsyannikova’s whereabouts since the incident are unknown, with her lawyers saying they had not been in touch with her.

Meanwhile, Ms Ovsyannikova called the attack on Ukraine a crime in a video.

Media outlets in Russia were explicitly banned from referring to the Russian invasion of its neighbour as a war.

Instead, the offical terminology describes the ongoing conflict as a “special military operation’’ to “demilitarise” and “denazify’’ Ukraine.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has thanked Ms Ovsyannikova for her protest.

(dpa/NAN)