Forbidden Stories investigates a journalist's disappearance in Russian-occupied Ukraine
Viktoriia Roshchyna's editors told her not to go. Hromadske TV, the independent Ukrainian outlet that had been her main employer, even stopped working with the young reporter since she was so determined to keep travelling to Russian-occupied territory.
But other editors took her stories, because they were important. Viktoriia wrote about the occupation regimes the Russians and their local collaborators were putting in place, about the occupation of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and about the terror: how Russia was snuffing out resistance by detaining, threatening, beating and killing thousands of local civilians.
Viktoriia never returned from what is thought to have been her fourth trip, however. She disappeared in August 2023 and was confirmed to be in Russian custody in April 2024. The Russian defence ministry wrote to Roshchyna's father in October to say that she had died.
It was not until February 2025 that a body marked simply '"unidentified male'" was delivered to Ukraine, among 757 bodies returned by Russia in a swap. It turned out to be a female body, and DNA tests in Ukraine and abroad showed that it matched Viktoriia's (her father disputes the test and has requested further investigation).
FRANCE 24 has been working with a consortium of 13 media under the umbrella " Forbidden Stories", the aim of which is to investigate the fates of journalists who have been killed or otherwise silenced, and to continue their work. Its reports are published today.
While few other Ukrainian journalists were prepared to take the risks Viktoriia did, most would agree that the stories she worked on needed to be told. From government-controlled Ukraine, various media seek to publish information about the occupied territories, though it is often hard to obtain and even harder to verify. Crimea Realities and Donbas Realities, offshoots of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, were specially created after the occupation of those regions. Others are local media in exile.
FRANCE 24 correspondent Gulliver Cragg 's first report as part of the Forbidden Stories' Viktoriia Project is about two editors-in-chief: Crimea Realities' Volodymyr Prytula, who left Crimea in 2014, and Oleksandr Hunko of the Nova Kakhovka City, a local news website in the occupied Kherson region, which he left in summer 2022. Both now face the additional challenge of finding new sources of funding after the Trump administration's cuts.
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