In a baggy red blouse and matching glasses, Yekaterina Barabash was pictured apparently blowing kisses from behind a bulletproof glass screen when she stood in the dock at a Moscow court.

A well-known film critic, she was sentenced to two months'house arrestfor allegedly spreading lies about the Russian militarys brutal war in Ukraine.

Now, Russian authorities have issued a wanted note for her after finding that shewasnt homeduring a check on April 13.

Friends of Barabash contacted by RFE/RL declined to comment on her disappearance, amid fears for her safety.

Barabash has been an occasional guest on RFE/RLs Russian Service programs forsome years, and has often criticized the Kremlins increasingly authoritarian grip on society.

When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she immediately condemned it. Russian forces have bombed the country, levelled whole cities to the ground, she wrote a few weeks into the conflict.

Words such as these were a direct challenge to the Kremlins narrative, which banned the word war and denied that civilians were being targeted. Shortly after the invasion began, Russia had passed new legislation providing jail sentences for discrediting the armed forces.

It has been used to jail hundredsof people since the war began, and has led to many others keeping silent. In arecent case, a 19-year-old woman in St. Petersburg received a nearly three-year prison sentence for glueing a short verse to a statue of a Ukrainian poet.

The same law eventually led to Barabashs arrest in February 2025. In court, prosecutors said she had distributed intentionally false information about the activities of the Russian military on social media.

Barabash in court. Moscow, February 26, 2025.

After receiving her sentence, she emerged from the court declaring at least Ill have two months of freedom, suggesting perhaps that she expected a jail sentence in the future.

Describing the moment of her arrest, she said it was surprising.

The doorbell rings and [you expect] a kind person, you open the door and there are men in masks.

Her case led to an outpouring of support from leading cultural figures.

Author Anna Berseneva wrote that millions of decent people think the same as Yekaterina Barabash. Critic Andrei Plakhov said she is an honorable, principled person - a serious risk factor right now.

Filmmaker Vitaly Mansky noted that many Kremlin critics had been silent about the war, opting for internal emigration, but that Barabash had greater integrity.

Earlier this month, Barabash was designated aforeign agentby the Russian Justice Ministry.

On April 21, the Russian prison agency issued a statement saying that she wasnt home when they called several days earlier. Subsequently, a Moscow court changed her sentence, meaning that she now faces prison.

A previous high-profile critic of the war, journalist MarinaOvsyannikova, fled Russia while under house arrest in October 2022.