An employee on a Russian state television channel interrupted a main news programme to protest against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine this evening.

Wielding a sign and shouting “Stop the war. No to war”, the woman, who was named by OVD-Info, an independent protest-monitoring group, and by the head of the Agora human rights group, as Marina Ovsyannikova, an employee of the state-run Channel One, charged onto the set at Ostankino Technical Center in Moscow during a live broadcast while news anchor Ekaterina Andreeva was delivering her evening bulletin on Monday to millions of viewers.

Her sign read: “Don’t believe the propaganda. They’re lying to you here” and was signed in English “Russians against the war”.

Ms Andreeva continued to read from the teleprompter louder, but Ms Ovsyannikova’s protest could continue to be heard until producers scrambled to switch to a record segment of a hospital.

The extraordinary act of dissent took place on day 19 of the war which began when Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24 in what it calls a special military operation.

Before the live TV protest, MsOvsyannikova also released a pre-recorded video on her social media channels in which she expressed her shame at working for Channel One and spreading “Kremlin propaganda”.

Speaking in Russian, she said: “Regrettably, for a number of years, I worked on Channel One and worked on Kremlin propaganda, I am very ashamed of this right now. Ashamed that I was allowed to tell lies from the television screen. Ashamed that I allowed the zombification of Russian people. 

“We were silent in 2014 when this was just beginning. We did not go out to protest when the Kremlin poisoned [opposition leader Alexander] Navalny,” she said.

“We are just silently watching this anti-human regime. And now the whole world has turned away from us and the next 10 generations won’t be able to clean themselves from the shame of this fratricidal war.”

“What is happening in Ukraine is a crime and Russia is the aggressor,” she added. “The responsibility of this aggression lies on the shoulders of only one person: Vladimir Putin”.

She urged fellow Russians to join anti-war protests in order to bring an end to the conflict. “Only we have the power to stop all this madness. Go to the protests. Don’t be afraid of anything. They can’t imprison us all.”

The OVD-Info human rights group has said that Ms Ovsyannikova was arrested shortly after her protest and was now being held in a police station in Moscow.

Tass news agency said she may face charges under a law against discrediting the armed forces, citing a law enforcement source.

The law, passed on March 4, makes public actions aimed at discrediting Russia's army illegal and bans the spread of fake news or the "public dissemination of deliberately false information about the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation". The offence carries a jail term of up to 15 years.

In a statement published by the state news agency TASS, Channel One said that “an incident took place with an extraneous woman in shot. An internal check is being carried out”.

Channel One is Russia’s largest channel with an estimated 250 million viewers worldwide.

State TV is the main source of news for many millions of Russians, and closely follows the Kremlin line that Russia was forced to act in Ukraine to demilitarise and "denazify" the country, and to defend Russian-speakers there against "genocide". Ukraine and most of the world have condemned that as a false pretext for an invasion of a democratic country.