Latest news with #ViktoriiaRoshchyna
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
PACE introduces Victory for Victoria Day in honour of tortured journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna
The PACE Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media has decided to establish a day dedicated to war correspondents and freedom of journalism in honour of Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, who was tortured and killed in Russian captivity. Source: MP Yevheniia Kravchuk, Deputy Chair of the Servant of the People faction, on Facebook Quote: "An important initiative was launched today [3 June – ed.] during the hearing on my resolution on Ukrainian journalists in Russian captivity at the PACE Committee on Culture, Science, Education and Media meeting in Norway. At the suggestion of PACE President Theodoros Roussopoulos, a 'Victory for Victoria' Day will be established – a day dedicated to war correspondents and freedom of journalism. This day in PACE will be dedicated to the memory of Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, who was abducted, tortured and killed in Russian captivity. Unfortunately, her story is not unique. Every year, dozens of journalists are killed, captured or disappear without a trace while covering the war against Ukraine." Details: Kravchuk said that the aim of the initiative is to honour journalists who have been killed or have disappeared while reporting the truth. It has been proposed that an annual PACE resolution, a minute of silence during the autumn session in Strasbourg, and a side event during the session will be introduced. Kravchuk also announced that Victory for Victoria Day will be celebrated for the first time this year at the PACE autumn session (29 September-3 October) during the vote on a resolution on Ukrainian journalists in captivity. Read articles by Viktoriia Roshchyna for Ukrainska Pravda Background: Viktoriia Roshchyna disappeared on 3 August 2023 while reporting from Russian-occupied territory. In 2022, Roshchyna wrote a series of articles for Ukrainska Pravda from the temporarily occupied territories. Her work included stories about life in occupied Crimea during the war, the pseudo-referendum in occupied Donetsk Oblast, and a photo report from the devastated city of Mariupol. On 25 July 2023, Roshchyna left Ukraine for Poland, planning to make the three-day journey via Russia to the occupied part of Ukraine's east. It was not until May 2024 that Russia admitted to having detained Roshchyna. The Russian Ministry of Defence sent a letter confirming this to her father, Volodymyr Roshchyn. On 10 October 2024, Petro Yatsenko, the head of the press service of the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War, said during the 24/7 national joint newscast that Viktoriia Roshchyna had died in Russian custody. Dmytro Lubinets, Ukrainian Parliamentary Commissioner for Human Rights, later said he had received confirmation of Roshchyna's death from the Russian side. The Office of the Prosecutor General announced that a criminal case opened in connection with Roshchyna's disappearance has been reclassified as a war crime combined with premeditated murder. Investigators from the media outlet found that Roshchyna was brutally tortured in Russian captivity: her body had knife wounds, she was tortured with electricity and Russian prison staff hid her from inspections. According to the autopsy, the body of journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna had numerous traces of torture and some of her internal organs are also missing. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Yahoo
‘Numerous signs of torture': a Ukrainian journalist's detention and death in Russian prison
The exchange took place on a lonely forest road in February. Moving along a line of refrigerated lorries, the teams in hazmat suits went about their grim work: preparing the remains of 757 Ukrainian military casualties handed over by Russia for the journey back to Kyiv. Clipboards in hand, intermediaries from the Red Cross checked their lists. For each body shrouded in white plastic, the Russians had provided a number, a name, a location, sometimes a cause of death. And then, at the very bottom of the last page, a mystery entry: 'NM SPAS 757.' The letters were abbreviations, taken to mean 'unidentified man' and 'extensive damage to the coronary arteries'. It would be weeks before officials could confirm what the Guardian and its reporting partners are publishing today. The unlabelled remains were those of a woman. Not a soldier, either, but one of the most high-profile civilians detained since the full-scale invasion. The journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was captured in the summer of 2023 near the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station. It was at least her fourth reporting trip into the occupied territories. She was by this stage of the war the only Ukrainian journalist prepared to risk crossing the frontline in order to pierce the information blackout imposed by Russia. Roshchyna died after a year in detention, aged 27. Information on the circumstances of her death is limited. Roshchyna was held without charge and without access to a lawyer. During her detention, her only known contact with the outside world was a four-minute phone call to her parents, a full year after she was taken. Preliminary forensics suggest 'numerous signs of torture', according to the prosecutor. Burn marks on her feet from electric shocks, abrasions on the hips and head, and a broken rib. Her hair, which she liked to wear long and tinted blonde at the tips, had been shaved. Sources close to the official investigation have also disclosed that the hyoid bone in her neck was broken. It is the kind of damage that can occur during strangulation. However, the exact cause of death may never be known because when her body was returned during the exchange on 14 February, certain parts were missing, namely the brain, eyes and larynx. A war crimes investigation has been opened with a view to prosecuting those responsible. There were also witnesses to her suffering. The Guardian, working with media partners including Roshchyna's publisher, Ukrainska Pravda, in a collaboration led by the French newsroom Forbidden Stories, has tracked down first-hand testimonies to reconstruct the events that led to Roshchyna's capture, and the details of her treatment in detention. This account is part of the Viktoriia project, an investigation into the abduction and systematic torture of what Ukraine believes could be as many as 16,000 of its civilians, the second part of which will be published on Wednesday. Most of those detained are being held without charge. The conditions of their detention constitute a suspected war crime, and evidence is being gathered for eventual prosecutions. The detained are aid workers, journalists, business owners, local politicians, church leaders, and anyone suspected of resisting the invasion. They are being held at more than 180 facilities in the occupied territories and inside Russia itself. And yet, in all the noise around peace talks, they are rarely mentioned. It is a subject Roshchyna felt was under-reported, and it was the focus of her last mission. The information about her final months has been gathered thanks to more than 50 interviews with survivors of Russian captivity as well as the families of some of those still held. Legal sources operating inside Russia and the occupied territories have also shared information, as have prison officials who resigned from the service in distress over what they had witnessed. While questions remain, one thing is certain: Roshchyna fell victim to the very crimes she had set out to expose. Known to her family as Vika, Roshchyna grew up in the shadow of war. Her father was a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and she was 17 when Russia annexed Crimea. She and her sister were raised in the same town as Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Kryvyi Rih, where her parents still live, was 30 miles from the Russian advance into southern Ukraine in 2022. Colleagues said she was obsessed with work and uncompromising. 'She had no life beyond her job, no friends, no partner. But also doing extraordinary work. For her it was a mission,' said Sevhil Musaieva, the editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda. 'She was one of the bravest journalists I met in my career.' To protect her sources, Roshchyna used multiple phones. She would set her messages to disappear, and her articles were written in files that would also self-delete. Roshchyna herself would vanish for weeks at a time, re-emerging to file her reports. In March 2022, while reporting from the occupied city of Berdiansk, she had a first brush with danger. Captured by a soldier and turned over to agents of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), she was coerced into recording a propaganda video and let go a few days later, after a public outcry. On her return home, colleagues urged her to rest and seek therapy. Her state of mind was fragile and she was very thin, they recalled. But Roshchyna continued to cross the frontline. She exposed the intimidation of workers keeping the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station running, and investigated the shooting of two 16-year-old boys who had dared to oppose the occupation. Musaieva said that on Roshchyna's last journey she was looking for the location of black sites, basements or industrial buildings where Russian security operatives systematically used torture to interrogate civilians or coerce them into false confessions. She was building a list of the FSB agents responsible. Roshchyna left Ukraine for the last time on 25 July 2023, taking a roundabout route into the occupied territories because there were no safe passages over the frontline. At 2.09pm that day, her phone connected to a Polish mobile network. From Poland, she travelled through Lithuania and north into Latvia. A photo of her passport and her entrance form, obtained by this investigation, suggests she entered Russia from Latvia, under her own name, via the Ludonka border crossing. The card states she was heading to the city of Melitopol. She travelled 1,000 miles south through Russia, crossing into occupied Ukraine a few days later. On 3 August, just a few days into her trip, her father, Volodymyr Roshchyn, raised the alarm after realising she had stopped checking in to her online messaging accounts. Information he has gathered, together with the accounts of three people held with Roshchyna at a notorious prison in the Russian coastal town of Taganrog, just inside the Russian border, points to what happened next. One of the witnesses was her cellmate, who was released last September and recorded her testimony on video for the prosecutor. She has asked not to be named, to protect herself and her family. Roshchyna appears to have rented an apartment in Enerhodar, the dormitory town next to the Zaporizhzhia power plant. She paid in advance for three nights and, leaving her backpack behind, went out to search for black sites. The journalist told her cellmate she thought she had been spotted by a drone. A police car arrived and she was taken to the police station, a five-storey building covered in pockmarked blue tiles where the windows are reinforced with metal grilles. She was held there for several days before being moved 80 miles (130km) south to Melitopol. The name translates as city of honey, and the area is famous for its cherry orchards. During the occupation, it played a far darker role. 'In Melitopol there is a big concentration of FSB and they have these temporary detention centres,' said a European intelligence official familiar with the situation in the occupied territories. In a process known as filtration, the FSB triages captives, depending on how valuable it deems them to be. Roshchyna is likely to have been considered a special case, given the information she was gathering. The prosecutor believes she was taken to a black site in Melitopol known as the 'garages', and according to her cellmate's testimony, Roshchyna later recounted how she was tortured there. Her body was covered in bruises. 'During interrogations, they used electric shocks … She got stabbed a few times – I saw them on her: arm for sure, leg too … Fresh knife scar – forearm, soft tissue between wrist and elbow. A scar of roughly 3cm, pierced through. She said one guy, she called him a jerk … was brutal, unhinged. 'On her leg, above the heel – I saw that too, 5cm wound. She said: 'I told them not to touch my leg … I begged them not to touch that wound.'' Towards the end of 2023, Roshchyna was told by an FSB officer she named as Maxim Moroz that she would be transferred to another prison and was promised better treatment there. According to witnesses, she was transported alone, by Jeep, to Taganrog. Here, she was detained at a pre-trial detention centre known as Sizo 2. 'She arrived already pumped full of unknown drugs,' said a second detainee who encountered Roshchyna at Taganrog, who cannot be named for security reasons. 'She arrived and she basically started to go crazy.' The Guardian will publish a separate, detailed account of the abuses inflicted on Ukrainians held at Taganrog. The conditions there were among the worst seen at any of the many detention facilities operated by Russia. Ukrainian intelligence has recorded 15 fatalities at the prison, based on information from released troops. In the torture rooms, soldiers and civilians were water-boarded, beaten and shocked in an electric chair. When outside their cells, they were forced to adopt a stress position known as the swan – bent forward with their hands clasped behind their back at chest level. Food was severely rationed, with four and a half spoonfuls per plate, according to one detainee who counted. For Roshchyna, the effect was catastrophic. She stopped eating. 'We would talk to her but she was lost in her head, eyes terrified,' recalled the first witness, her cellmate. Roshchyna would lie 'curled up foetal on the floor' behind a curtain that screened the toilet, out of sight of the guards. Her weight dropped to 30kg (less than 5st). 'She could stand up, but only with me helping as she was in such a state that she could not even lift her head off the pillow. I would prop her up and she would grab the top bunk to pull herself upright,' her cellmate said. Yevgeny Markevich, a soldier now in rehabilitation in Ukraine after a prisoner exchange, said: 'She did not officially declare a hunger strike, she simply began to refuse food.' . He said he saw her once but heard her most days as she was held near to him, in cell 115. 'At first she explained it by saying that it was for religious reasons, fasting or something, then she began to say that she could not [eat] for health reasons.' Roshchyna's feet and legs swelled, according to her cellmate's testimony. She was offered heart pills but appears to have refused these. Heart problems and fluid retention in the leg tissues are both signs of starvation. In June, she was carried out on a stretcher. She spent several weeks at a hospital in Taganrog where, according to witnesses, she was watched over by six masked guards armed with machine guns. The level of security, and the efforts made to keep her alive, suggest Moscow saw her as a valuable negotiating pawn. In July, she was reportedly sent back to Taganrog with an IV drip in her arm. It seems she continued to refuse food. The head of the prison asked her cellmates what she liked to eat, and separate meals were cooked for her. Witnesses say she was offered bananas and sweets. In April 2024, her family had received the first official confirmation that Roshchyna was alive, in a letter from the Russian defence ministry. It stated only that she 'has been detained and is currently in the territory of the Russian Federation'. Colleagues began pulling strings. A message was sent to the Vatican, where Pope Francis, who had been able to communicate with Russia through backchannels, agreed to ask for her name to be added to the prisoner exchange list. Word eventually reached her editor that she was to be released. Towards the end of August, Roshchyna was allowed to phone home. Her parents were told by the Ukrainian negotiators she was on hunger strike. They kept their mobiles switched on all day, waiting for her call. When she finally came on the line, Roshchyna was speaking in Russian. 'I was promised that I would be home in September,' she told them. Her father urged her to eat. Then she said her farewells. 'Well, that's it. Bye, bye. Mom, Dad, I love you.' On 13 September, bathed in autumn sunshine, 49 prisoners of war stepped off a coach from Russia on to Ukrainian soil. A welcome party met them with flags and bouquets of yellow sunflowers wrapped in blue tissue paper. Roshchyna's cellmate was there, along with at least two other men held at Taganrog. But the journalist was missing. Exactly why has never been made clear. On 8 September, Roshchyna was taken from her cell, ready for the long journey back to Ukraine. The anonymous Taganrog detainee was one of the last to see her alive. 'We asked a girl from the cell to help her go down. With her help, she went down when they were supposed to exchange her. After that, a security officer came and said that the journalist never made it to the exchange. The officer added: 'It's her own fault.'' Some weeks later, the deputy head of Russia's military police wrote to Roshchyna's father to say she had died on 19 September. When Roshchyna's body was eventually returned, it was in such bad condition that visual identification was difficult. However, attached to her leg, examiners found a tag with the handwritten inscription 'V.V. Roshchyna', and the DNA test was a match with her parents. Her father, in his grief, refuses to accept she is gone. He has requested additional examinations. And he has continued to write letters, including to Taganrog, demanding information. The Sizo director, Aleksandr Shtoda, has replied twice claiming Roshchyna was never there. His most recent response, in January, stated she 'is not and was not listed in the databases'. In November 2022, Roshchyna described what motivated her. She had been given an award for courage by the International Women's Media Foundation, but she did not want to stop work to attend the ceremony in Los Angeles and so she sent a message, hailing her colleagues. 'We have remained faithful to our mission, to convey the truth to the world, countering Russian propaganda,' she said. 'Unfortunately, many journalists have died. I want to dedicate this award to them. After all, they died in the fight for the truth, trying to record Russian crimes. I thank them.'
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Vika: The journalist who exposed Russian 'black sites', then ended up in one
Viktoriia Roshchyna, a Ukrainian journalist known as Vika, was determined to report on Russia's 'black sites'. 'These 'black sites', they're not prisons; there's no control on behaviour there,' Juliette Garside, an editor at the Guardian, tells Michael Safi. 'So it's where we know that some of the worst war crimes, the worst human rights abuses, take place. 'These are sites where largely civilians, anyone captured by the Russians, are held, often tortured. And there are different reasons for the torture. It could just be intimidation, it could be trying to get genuine intelligence from them … and sometimes it's gathering material for show trials, false confessions.' In July 2023, Viktoriia set off on a dangerous reporting trip to Zaporizhzhia, in a Russian-occupied part of Ukraine. She wanted to find these sites, and name the people responsible for the abuses inside. A few days later, she vanished. A global collective of journalists, including the Guardian's investigations correspondent and the open-source lead Manisha Ganguly and Juliette Garside, have worked to piece together what came next. Their reporting uncovered what happened to Viktoriia at these sites, including her time in a prison in the Russian coastal town of Taganrog, which was notorious for torture. 'They had an electric chair room, which was specifically constructed for this purpose,' Manisha says. 'They had a room with a tub where detainees would be drowned. They also had a room with bars on the walls where detainees would be suspended upside down in a foetal position with their knees strapped to the bar and in handcuffs where they'd be beaten or electrocuted for 10 to 15 minutes.' You can read more about the The Viktoriia Project here. Support the Guardian today:
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
MPs appeal to Zelensky with request to award title of Hero of Ukraine to journalist Roshchyna
Ukrainian lawmakers on May 14 backed an appeal to award journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, who was killed in Russian captivity, the title of Hero of Ukraine, Suspilne reported. A total of 246 MPs voted in favor of awarding Roshchyna the title. The appeal now has to be signed by President Volodymyr Zelensky. Roshchyna, 27, disappeared in August 2023 while reporting from Ukraine's Russian-occupied territories. Moscow admitted she was in Russian detention the following year. Her body was returned to Ukraine in late February and falsely labeled as that of an "unidentified man." A forensic examination was later able to identify the body as Roshchyna's through DNA testing. Ukrainian officials confirmed Roshchyna's death on Oct. 10, 2024, but said that the circumstances were still under investigation. Russia claims Roshchyna died on Sept. 19, 2024. A recent large-scale media investigation revealed that Roshchyna's body had been returned with missing organs, possibly an attempt to obscure signs of suffocation or strangulation. The Media Initiative for Human Rights, a Ukrainian NGO, reported that Roshchyna had been held in at least two notorious Russian prisons: Penal Colony 77 in Berdiansk in occupied Ukraine and Detention Center 2 in Russia's Taganrog. Both facilities are known for the use of torture against prisoners. Roshchyna was also detained in March 2022 for 10 days by Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers while leaving Berdiansk in the direction of Mariupol. As a condition of her release, she was forced to record a video saying Russian forces had saved her life. Read also: What we know about Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna who died in Russian captivity We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
Yahoo
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Ukrainian Parliament asks Zelenskyy to posthumously award title Hero of Ukraine to journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna
The Verkhovna Rada (Ukrainian Parliament) has asked President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to posthumously award the title of Hero of Ukraine to journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna. Source: Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne Details: The request was supported by 246 Members of Parliament. Viktoriia Roshchyna worked for such media outlets as Ukrainska Pravda, Radio Ukraine, UA:Pershyi, hromadske, News of Donbas, and Radio Liberty. In 2022, she received the Courage in Journalism Award of the International Women's Media Foundation. In March 2022, Russian troops detained Viktoriia in the temporarily occupied city of Berdiansk in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, but she was released at that time. In summer 2022, Roshchyna attempted to enter the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine for a reporting assignment. According to her father, Volodymyr Roshchyn, on 27 July, Viktoriia left Ukraine for Poland and intended to reach the occupied areas in eastern Ukraine via Russia. On 3 August, during her last conversation with her family, she said she had been undergoing checks at the border for several days but did not specify her location. That same day, she went missing. In May 2024, Russia confirmed it had detained Viktoriia. The Russian Ministry of Defence sent a letter to her father, Volodymyr Roshchyn, confirming her arrest. On 10 October 2024, the Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War announced that Viktoriia Roshchyna had died in Russian captivity. Andrii Yusov, representative of Defence Intelligence of Ukraine, stated that Viktoriia had been on the list for a prisoner exchange and was expected to return home soon. On 11 October, the Prosecutor General's Office reported that, in light of information about her death in Russia, the criminal case initially opened regarding her disappearance had been reclassified. It is now being investigated as a war crime involving intentional murder. Investigators from discovered that Roshchyna had been brutally tortured in Russian captivity. She had stab wounds on her body and had been electrocuted, and staff at the Russian penal colony where she was held hid her away when inspections were carried out. Read more: The Viktoriia Project: the story of the captivity and torture endured by journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna and thousands of Ukrainians imprisoned by Russia Read some of Viktoriia Roshchyna's writing for Ukrainska Pravda here. Support Ukrainska Pravda on Patreon!
