133. A Ukrainian journalist killed in Russian prison

Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, known as Vika has been missing since July 2023. 

She was performing her professional duties and reporting from behind enemy lines in occupied Ukraine.

She wasn’t alone. She was one of an estimated 18,000 civilians detained by Russia since the beginning of the invasion.

She is no more. 

The Russian Ministry of Defence wrote to her family that she had died, age 27, on 19 September 2024.

Her remains, which were returned to Ukraine, showed multiple signs of torture.

Now the details of her last days in captivity have emerged with the witness account of a soldier who was with her when she was transported to a prison.

Roshchyna was investigating Russia’s torture sites known as “black sites”.

According to the people who were part of the Russian prison management services in these shit holes there is no control on behaviour and some of the worst war crimes and the worst human rights abuses openly take place.

In fact, these are torture cells where civilians captured by the Russians are held. False confessions are gathered by intimidating the prisoners.

Viktoriia was on a 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. But a few days later, she vanished.

A Ukrainian soldier Mykyta Semenov has come forward with an account that Roshchyna died after being transported to a prison in the town of Kizel.

He travelled in the same wagon, and first saw the journalist as she walked down the corridor to go to the toilet.

“I saw her. She walked past our compartment. She was wearing a light blue summer dress with flowers. She also had summer sneakers with white soles, sporty ones. And she had a small makeup mirror she carried with her,” said Semenov.

Semenov said: “The journalist was walking with her hands behind her back in a stress position. Having been on hunger strike while held at another facility. She was in visibly poor health. It looked like everything was difficult for her: walking was difficult, eating was difficult, speaking was difficult. It seemed like that dress of hers … that the dress was carrying her. Holding her up.”

Held in the adjacent cell, Semenov said he was able to identify her by listening to her conversations with the guards. 

When the prisoners arrived at Kizel, they were beaten again, in what is known as the reception ritual, meted out to civilians and soldiers throughout the Russian prison system. 

Semenov was eventually returned home. The last he heard of Roshchyna, she was still refusing food. 

Russia has never provided a death certificate to her family, but the autopsy found she suffered violence at the very end: bruises on her neck and a fracture of her hyoid bone indicated trauma usually caused by strangulation.

Now about the black sites – 

A recent report captures the inside of one black site like this - 

“They had an electric chair room. 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.”

What is the difference between Israel and Russia?

Ukrainian civilians and captured defence personal are also human beings, being tortured only because they were born in Ukraine. 

War was not started by them. They were peace loving citizens. Why they are facing such third-degree treatment? They are not a danger to the government and society.

Russians have faced such treatment during WWII and they should relate with this.

I am badly upset learning the death of the 27 years old journalist in Russian prison. 

The world was never a safe place.