Ukraine says journalist died in Russian custody

Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who went missing in an occupied part of her country, died in custody in Russia last month, Ukrainian authorities announced earlier this week.

Roshchyna, 27, disappeared in August last year during a reporting trip to a Russian-occupied area in Ukraine. She disappeared for months and her loved ones had no idea what happened to her.

According to the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, Moscow only informed Roshchyna’s family that she was being detained in Russia in April, a few months after her capture.

“I have official documents from the Russian side confirming the death of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who was illegally deprived of her freedom by Russia,” Ukrainian Human Rights Commissioner Dmytro Lubinets said in a statement. press release.

CNN requested comment from Russian authorities but received no response.

Roshchyna’s colleagues said she had traveled to Russian-controlled territory – a dangerous ordeal for any Ukrainian – to report on the lives of people living under occupation. They said they believed the young journalist had been killed by Russian authorities.

“We have every reason to believe that her death was either the result of a deliberate assassination or the result of the cruel treatment and violence to which she was subjected during her captivity in Russia,” journalists and media professionals said Ukrainians in a published statement. in several Ukrainian media.

The statement added that Roshchyna was in good health before her one-year imprisonment.

Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office said it was investigating his death as a war crime combined with premeditated murder.

Journalist Evgeniya Motorevskaya, who worked with Roshchyna as the former editor-in-chief of Hromadske, a Ukrainian media outlet, said the young reporter was determined to do her job as best she could.

“For her, there was nothing more important than journalism. Vika has always been the place where the most important events for the country took place. And she would have continued doing this for many years, but the Russians killed her,” she said in a statement posted on Hromadske’s website, referring to Roshchyna by her diminutive.

Petro Yatsenko, a spokesman for Ukraine’s Coordination Center for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said in a statement that some 25 Ukrainian journalists were being held in Russian captivity and several others were missing.

The Ukrainian government says thousands of Ukrainians are arbitrarily detained in Russia. Lubinets, kyiv’s human rights commissioner, said in July that 14,000 Ukrainian civilians were in Russian captivity, some of whom have been detained since 2014, when war broke out in eastern Ukraine and the Russia annexed Crimea.

Yatsenko said that, according to Russian authorities, Roshchyna died while being transferred from a detention center in the southern Russian city of Taganrog to Moscow. He said the transfer was in preparation for his release as part of a prisoner exchange.

“Unfortunately, we did not have enough time,” he said in a statement.

Tetyana Katrychenko of Media Initiative for Human Rights, a Ukrainian rights group, said the Taganrog detention center was known for its cruel treatment of detainees, according to a statement posted on her social media channels.

CNN has previously reported on the widespread torture of Ukrainian prisoners by Russian authorities.

“Taganrog… is known as one of the most brutal places of detention for Ukrainians in the Russian Federation. It’s called hell on earth,” Katrychenko said, adding that Roshchyna was detained in Taganrog from at least May to September 2024. “She was held in solitary confinement,” she added.

Roshchyna received the 2022 Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women in Media Foundation. His work has been published in several media outlets, including Ukrayinska Pravda, Hromadske and Radio Free Europe.