There are deaths that exceed the battlefield. Dead that are no longer just war crime, but even more radical: the deliberate erasure of humans.
The fate inflicted on the young Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchina cannot be understood as an act of isolated violence. It is a message, a ritual act, a staging. She was not just killed: she was tortured and mutilated. The found body was no longer a body – but a warning. The brain, the eyes, the larynx: torn off. It is an execution, of course, but above all a symbolic condemnation for erasure. No longer think. Do not see anymore. Do not speak anymore.
On September 19, 2024, Viktoria Roshchina died in captivity in a Russian prison in Taganrog. She had been removed a year earlier, in August 2023, when she was carrying out a journalistic investigation in the occupied Ukrainian territories.
His corpse, returned to Ukraine in February 2025, was unrecognizable, declared male, without name, faceless. It was only by a DNA test that his identity could be confirmed.
This broken body of a young woman, in good health before her capture, weighed only 30 kilos. Fractured ribs. Electric burns. Multiple abrasions. And, above all, this triple chilling mutilation: brain, eyes, larynx absent.
As summarized by the Russian dissident Alexander Nevzorov: “We must no longer think, we must no longer speak, we must no longer see. »»
It is not a simple death: it is a demonstrative execution. A murder conceived as an act of symbolic terror. A killing of consciousness.
She was 27 years old. She worked for independent Ukrainian media. It was not a spectacular heroine. She was not looking for glory or image. But she was going to where little daring to venture: in the occupation areas, with the displaced, prisoners, forgotten. She questioned. She documented. She sought to understand and transmit the truth.
In March 2022, she had already been arrested by Russian forces and held ten days. She had come out marked, but determined to continue.
His disappearance, then his death, are part of a Russian strategy of targeted terror. Since 2022, more than sixty Ukrainian journalists have been killed, removed or missing. But the case of Viktoria Roshchina goes beyond physical elimination.
What strikes in this case is not only torture, but its gratuity, its disconnection of a military or strategic purpose.
Viktoria was neither a soldier nor a spy. She had no state secrets. It was not a question of making her speak, but to silence her forever.
Reports from the Guardian and Forbidden Stories describe the same techniques used on other Ukrainian detainees: electrocution, rape, execution simulacra, mutilation. But what challenges here is inhumanity without objective. The pleasure taken to destruction.
Torture for information is already a crime. Torture for the simple pleasure of humiliating, dominating, breaking, falls in another order: a form of regression towards the archaic. A enjoyment of destruction, where the other is no longer an enemy, but one thing.
Viktoria’s death is not a burr or an error. It is a sadistic ritual. An exemplary punishment, a warning. A silent but clear message addressed to those who, again, seek to understand.
But this ritual is not the work of a single man. It was not the hands of Putin who torn the eyes of Viktoria. They are those of agents, doctors, guards – ordinary men. This is the real horror: industrialized violence, delegate, accepted. What Hannah Arendt called “banality of evil”.
Vladimir Putin built a perfect factory, a machine to produce men capable of killing without remorse.
His war is just a tool for conquest. It is a system, a matrix. It channels frustration, occupies the masses, legitimizes power. It prevents the return to a civil society, because it no longer exists, destroyed by the possibility of unpunished evil.
And above all: she creates monsters. Not isolated psychopaths, but ordinary citizens drawn up to obey, hate, hit, kill for free
As Christopher Browning recalls in “Ordinary men”, the executioners of the Shoah were not fanatics. They were neighborhood police, family fathers, neighbors. What Putin woke up in Russia is this universal ability to kill by obedience, by habit, by moral comfort.
What makes these crimes possible is less the brutality of the executioners than the silence of those who could have – to stop them.
Since 2014, the impunity of acts of Russian aggression has been constant. The annexation of Crimea, the MH17 flight, the crimes in Syria, the tortures in the Donbass: none of these acts sparked a response from the international community to its right measure. The red lines have been deleted.
And this cowardice is multiple: diplomatic, legal, media. She takes the policed faces of the Chancellery who avoid the angry words. It nestles in the comfort of editorialists who put into perspective. In university speeches that find an explanation for everything.
Silence is a choice. He has his accomplices. A world on the edge of the abyss.
We believed that the Nuremberg trials, the memory museums, the lessons in history had immune to us. But barbarism adapts. She does not come back with armbands or swastikas. It advances masked, mediated, legitimized. By talk shows, influencers, epic stories of brute force.
What Putin has understood is that his hungry people, stupid by misery, in search of lost “grandeur”, can be nourished by violence. That we can offer him the pleasure of blood.
And what makes it possible is the absence of real justice. Fear of gears and other escalations. The refusal to act.
Russia today is not an accident. It is a logical sequence of barbarism acts which becomes a rule.
It will be necessary to judge the executioners, not only the system, which made them.
The day may come where this Moscow criminal regime will fall. But that won’t be enough. It will not be enough to defeat militarily for justice to be done. It will be necessary to document, appoint, judge. It will be necessary to refuse the too convenient excuses: “I did not know”, “I did only obey”, “I was afraid”.
Viktoria Roshchina died because she wanted to understand. Because she was a journalist. Because she was Ukrainian.
The murder of Viktoria is not an anomaly. It is the faithful mirror of a system. It is not the fact of a few sadists, but of a human, administrative, medical, penitentiary chain. A chain made of ordinary Russians, who torture, who violate, who kill and who are proud of it.
This Russian, absolute evil no longer screams. He executed, calmly, bureaucratically. He advances masked. And he will only stop if we have the courage to name him, and punish him.
Viktoria’s silence screams. He demands an answer. Not just for her. For all of us.
