Ukrainian Roshchyna went missing in August 2023 in a captured part of Ukraine by Russia.
In a case of a jailed journalist, Russian authorities only confirmed that he had been detained after nine months. They gave no reason.
This week, for example, her father received a brief letter from the defence ministry in Moscow notifying him that Victoria was dead at the age of 27.
The lamented journalist’s body was to be among those repatriated in one of the exchanges of corpses between Russia and Ukraine typical among warring parties. It was assigned death date as 19 September.
Once more there was no reason given.
Vigil for Viktoriia
Over the weekend, friends came to the Maidan in central Kyiv to commemorate Viktoriia. They moved to formation on the steps adjusting the photograph’s portrait of her youthful countenance to the group of spectators.
“She had huge courage,” one woman began the tributes.
“We will miss her enormously,” said another, fighting back her own tears.
The stories Viktoriia was telling her viewers where glimpses of life that Ukrainians were not being offered from anyone else.
Her colleagues recall that she wanted to cover occupied territories of Ukraine very much even though she knew how dangerous it was: once she got detained in custody for 10 days.
“Her parents one day asked us to retired my sister from serving us, but never did, until now,” a former employer said.
All her editors tried to prevent her from doing so. But it was impossible.”
The young reporter was finally able to go freelance in order to deploy herself and when she got back, newspapers would purchase her reports.
This is well illustrated by the fact that despite writing in rather transparent terms of ‘occupied’ territory she never assumed a pen name despite labeling those who collaborated with the Russians as traitors .
s 100% sure she’d be back on 13 September this year.’ According to my sources it was 100% guaranteed,” Musaieva of Ukrayinska Pravda explains.
Detention
She had been informed that Viktoriia would be exchanged as part of one of the regular operations prisoners-of-war exchanges Ukraine and Russia conduct, to be held mid last month.
“Therefore, what did they do to her in prison? Why didn’t she come home?”
Viktoriia was transferred together with another Ukrainian woman but both of them were not released as part of the swap.
“That means she was taken somewhere else,” says Media Initiative director Tetyana Katrychenko. “They say to Lefortovo. Why there? We don’t know.”
She told me that it cannot be the usual custom before a swap.
Lefortovo prison with spies and serious offenders from the FSB security service is located in Moscow.
Perhaps they went there to begin a trial or a case or whatever it is they do when somebody goes missing. That has happened with other KIAs detained from Kherson and Melitopol districts,” explains Tetyana.
At some point, she had called a hunger strike, but that day her father urged her to start eating again and she agreed.
“That needs investigating. It also means we’d be blaming her, partially, and not the Russian Federation, as we should,” Tetyana cautions.
Civilian hostages
The Ukranian intelligence service has also validated the death of Viktoriia and the General Prosecutor’s office has altered its criminal case from unlawful confinement to homicide.
In Russia, there was no information about any crime for which Viktoriia was charged, and the specifics of her arrest are unknown.
“It’s killing. Just the killing of hostages. I don’t know other word.”
Russia hasn’t commented.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion, many thousands of civilians were forcibly removed from territories in Ukraine that Moscow now occupies.
Currently, the Media Initiative has put together a list of 1,886 names.
“And of course, there are likely to be many more that we are not aware of at this point.”
conclusion
According to the friends and colleagues of the girl named Viktoriia, they were stunned and did not agree to remain passive, they will conduct an investigation into what happened.
“Her life was her work,” Angelina Karyakina, the editor-in-chief of Hromadske, said. “It is a group of people who have this kind of determination.”