She made an anti-war drawing as a child in Russia. Four years on, she’s still living with the fallout

Masha Moskalyova has spent a quarter of her life in jeopardy or on the run because of a picture she drew when she was just 12 years old.

Four years on, she and her father are living in hiding in a small village in eastern France and still worry about their safety. One of the few things they still have of their former lives in Russia is the drawing itself.

“Even though it’s a child’s drawing and seems so simple, who could have expected it to have such consequences?” Masha says, as we consider the drawing together. Drawn in colored pencil, it shows a mother protecting her child from the bombs being launched from Russia. A Ukrainian flag reads “Glory to Ukraine,” while a Russian flag beside says, “No Putin, no war.”

She drew it just a few weeks after Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2022. In her hometown of Yefremov, about 300 kilometers (185 miles) south of Moscow and about halfway to the border with Ukraine, Masha’s teacher had asked the class to draw pictures supporting Russian troops. Most of the children drew tanks, or the letter Z, used by Russia as a pro-war symbol. Masha, who is now 16, decided to do something else.

“I drew the situation as I actually saw it, what I believed to be the truth,” she says. “After the lesson, one of my classmates, who had seen the drawing, came up to me. Perhaps she was the one who reported it, leading to everything that followed. In any case, the drawing ended up in the hands of the police. And that was when all our problems began.”

Shortly after that her father, Alexey Moskalyov, was charged with “discrediting the Russian military” and sentenced to two years in a penal colony. Masha, whom he’d been raising alone, was sent to an orphanage.

After his release, the pair fled, traveling through Armenia and onto France, where they arrived earlier this year and where they have been given a temporary visa.

A dog that Masha had been given in the orphanage has now arrived from Armenia, which she is pleased about. Still, what’s striking is how alone they seem, with nothing of their former lives and only each other for company.

Alexey’s health is fragile because of his time in jail and Masha is now schooled in a language she doesn’t speak. Both fear for their safety. But Alexey says he is just proud of his daughter.

“Everything I’ve lost, everything I had in Russia, is compensated for by the fact that we can now speak freely and tell the truth,” he says. “By the fact that we are now in a country where people are not persecuted for their words or their opinions.”

And words are exactly what Masha intends to keep using. Outside of school, Masha spends her time trying to reach audiences inside Russia and beyond, through YouTube and social media. And her criticism now extends to US President Donald Trump’s handshake with his Russian counterpart.

“I want to say that what Trump is doing is terrible,” she tells CNN. “The fact that the president of a free country shakes hands with a murderer,” she says, holding Russian President Vladimir Putin responsible for the deaths caused by the war in Ukraine. “The fact that you could say he is being controlled by him is another matter altogether.”

Going home remains a distant prospect. “I would return to Russia with enormous joy,” Masha says. “But when will this regime change? I don’t know. How many decades will it take? How many decades before Russia becomes a democratic and free country?”

It is hard to fathom that a single child’s drawing could have angered the Russian authorities as much as this one did, but Masha seems to get it. After all, the point of authoritarianism is that it cannot allow any dissent, however childish.

“Here was a child who spoke the truth, who wasn’t afraid,” she says. “And if that child isn’t alone, if there are many children like her, if it’s not just one teenager but a thousand teenagers, not just one adult but a million, then that is what will change Russia for the better.”

The last four years have clearly taken their toll on Masha, who seems mature beyond her years and graver than any 16-year-old should be.

Perhaps the most surprising thing is that after everything she has endured – being sent to the orphanage, her father’s incarceration and their time on the road – she still has the drawing in her possession.

It was as they were preparing to flee their home that she found it on a shelf by chance, among her childhood notebooks.

“It hadn’t been confiscated,” she says. “They hadn’t found it or paid any attention to it. Perhaps because the police hadn’t thought to search through a child’s belongings.”

So, today, one of Masha’s only belongings from her former life is the very drawing that ended it.

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