Wearing a red T-shirt and matching glasses, Yekaterina Barabash was photographed blowing kisses from behind bulletproof glass as she appeared in the dock at a Moscow court.
The well-known film critic was sentenced to two months of house arrest for allegedly spreading "lies" about the Russian military's war in Ukraine, REL writes.
Now, Russian authorities have issued a warrant for her, and she faces up to 10 years in prison after authorities discovered the 63-year-old was not at home during a search on April 13.
On April 21, Russia's prison agency released a statement saying she was not at home when they visited her a few days earlier. A Moscow court later changed her sentence, meaning she now faces imprisonment.
Barabashi's friends contacted by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty refused to comment on her disappearance, citing fears for her safety, A2 reports.
Barabash has been an occasional guest on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Russian Service programs for several years and has often criticized the Kremlin's increasingly authoritarian control over Russian society.
When Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she immediately condemned it. Russian forces “have bombed the country, leveled entire cities,” she wrote a few weeks after the conflict began.
Such words directly challenged the Kremlin narrative, which banned the use of the word “war” and denied that civilians were being targeted, despite evidence to the contrary.
Shortly after the invasion began, Russia passed new legislation that provides for prison sentences for “discrediting” the armed forces. The law has been used to imprison hundreds of people since the start of the war and has silenced many more.
In a recent case, a 19-year-old woman in St. Petersburg received a sentence of almost 3 years in prison for placing a short poetic line on a statue of a Ukrainian poet.
The same law led to Barabash's arrest in February 2025. In court, prosecutors said she had spread "deliberately false information about the activities of the Russian military" on social media.
After the sentencing, she left the courtroom declaring that "at least I will have two months of freedom," perhaps suggesting that she expected a prison sentence in the future.
Describing the moment of her arrest, she said it was "shocking."
"The bell rings and [you expect] a good person, you open the door and there are men in masks," she had said.
Her case sparked a wave of support from prominent cultural figures.
Writer Anna Berseneva wrote that “millions of honest people think the same way as Yekaterina Barabash.” Critic Andrei Plakhov said she is “an honest, principled person – a serious risk factor in this time.”
Director Vitalii Mansky noted that many Kremlin critics had chosen silence in the face of the war, preferring “internal emigration,” but that Barabash had “more integrity.”
Earlier this month, Barabash was declared a "foreign agent" by the Russian Ministry of Justice.
Another high-profile critic of the war, journalist Marina Ovsyannikova, fled Russia while under house arrest in October 2022./ REL (A2 Televizion)
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