A protester storms a live broadcast on Russia’s most-watched news show, yelling ‘Stop the war!’

A state tv worker burst onto the stay broadcast of Russia’s most-watched information present on Monday night, yelling “Cease the struggle!” and holding up an indication that mentioned “They’re mendacity to you right here,” in a unprecedented act of protest in opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The lady, Marina Ovsyannikova, labored for Channel 1, the state-run tv channel whose information broadcast she stormed, in accordance with a Russian rights group that’s giving her authorized help. The group additionally launched a video through which Ms. Ovsyannikova says she is “deeply ashamed” to have labored to supply “Kremlin propaganda.”

The information present, “Vremya,” is among the many Kremlin’s flagship propaganda retailers, watched by thousands and thousands of Russians each night. The off-script intervention underscored how dissent is seeping into public consciousness in Russia, even after President Vladimir V. Putin has stifled opposition to the struggle and has enacted a regulation to punish anybody spreading no matter the federal government deems “false information” about its Ukraine invasion with as much as 15 years in jail.

“We’re Russian folks, pondering and good ones,” she mentioned within the video she recorded, calling for Russians to protest in opposition to the struggle. “Solely we now have the facility to cease all this craziness.”

On Monday night, Ms. Ovsyannikova walked onto the set because the anchor was describing Russian talks with Belarus over easy methods to soften the blow from Western sanctions, on-line movies present. She unfurled an indication with a Ukrainian and a Russian flag that mentioned, in English, “No struggle” and “Russians in opposition to struggle.” In Russian, it mentioned: “Cease the struggle. Don’t imagine the propaganda. They’re mendacity to you right here.”

The anchor Yekaterina Andreyeva, a veteran who has hosted the “Vremya” newscast for greater than twenty years, continued to learn her script whilst Ms. Ovsyannikova protested behind her. Inside a couple of seconds, the present minimize away from the set. Afterward, in accordance with the Tass state information company, Channel 1 mentioned it was “investigating an incident with an outsider within the body throughout a stay broadcast.”

Ms. Ovsyannikova was detained after the protest and was being held at a small police station at Moscow’s Ostankino broadcasting middle, in accordance with OVD-Information, an activist group that helps Russians detained for protesting. Extra particulars on her situation weren’t instantly out there.

The second went viral on-line in Russia, regardless of the Kremlin’s current efforts to dam dissent on the web. Inside hours, Ms. Ovsyannikova’s Fb web page had greater than 26,000 feedback, with many individuals thanking her or praising her for her bravery in Russian, English and Ukrainian.

Her protest adopted Mr. Putin’s signing of a regulation earlier this month that successfully criminalizes any public opposition to or impartial information reporting concerning the struggle. The regulation may make it against the law to easily name the struggle a “struggle” — the Kremlin says it’s a “particular army operation” — on social media or in a information article or broadcast. Underscoring journalists’ fears of the regulation, the impartial newspaper Novaya Gazeta blurred out Ms. Ovsyannikova’s antiwar poster in an image of the protest it posted on Twitter.

Since Mr. Putin launched the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, the federal government has additionally blocked entry inside Russia to the web sites of main Russian-language retailers which can be based mostly outdoors the nation, and to Fb, the social community widespread with the Westward-looking city center class the place criticism of the invasion has been sturdy. On Monday, it additionally began blocking entry to Instagram, which is a vastly widespread venue for reporting and activism in Russia.

Hundreds of protesters have taken to the streets and squares of Russian cities to protest in current weeks, solely to be met with heavy police presences. There have been some 15,000 arrests, in accordance with a tally compiled by OVD-Information. Whereas Mr. Putin has been adept at ruthlessly stifling dissent prior to now, he may face a problem if the protests metastasize into a bigger motion that punctures the official struggle narrative.

The English-language content material of Ms. Ovsyannikova’s poster mirrored how some Russians are eager to indicate that the struggle in opposition to Ukraine shouldn’t be being fought of their identify. Despondent over their nation’s future and afraid of potential conscription and closed borders, tens of hundreds of Russians have fled to Turkey, Armenia, Georgia, Central Asia and Europe because the Russian invasion started.

Alina Lobzina reported from Istanbul.