Viktoriia Roshchina’s father received a letter from the Russian Defense Ministry on Thursday, coldly announcing that his daughter had died on September 19. The exact circumstances of the death are still to be established, but according to several official Ukrainian sources, the journalist was being transferred from a prison in Taganrog (South) to that of Lefortovo, near Moscow. Andrii Yusov, spokesperson for Ukrainian military intelligence, confirms that she was on the lists for upcoming prisoner exchanges. She had to be released.
Hunger strike
According to her father, the young woman had stopped eating for several days. “Hunger strikes have always been the tool of protest of Ukrainian dissidents in the gulag, confirms philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko. When they were powerless in the camps, this was their last possible course of action. The difference between the eras is that the USSR feared having a bad reputation abroad. Today’s Russia doesn’t care and shows even worse cruelty than in Soviet times.” At the beginning of September, Viktoriia was reportedly seen by a fellow inmate, with just skin and bones.
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov accuses Russian MPs of seeking to assassinate him and promises ‘vendetta’
Originally from southern Ukraine, Viktoriia Roshchina began her career in 2014, publishing her investigations into corruption scandals and other affairs in the best independent media in kyiv: Hromadske, Slidstvo, Ukrainska Pravda… “With Vika, it was never easy,” say today several of her former editors-in-chief, to whom she gave cold sweats, because of the dangerousness of her investigations and reports. In March 2022, after the start of the Russian invasion, Viktoriia Roshchina was arrested for the first time by the Russian FSB near Berdyansk (South), when she was about to go to Mariupol.
Documentation of abuses committed by the Russians
Released after ten days, the reporter immediately resumed in a monastic manner the work of documenting the abuses committed by the Russian occupying forces in the regions of Kherson, Zaporizhia and Kharkiv, revealing the identity of several perpetrators of crimes of war, notably of the Wagner militia. In July 2023, against the advice of her colleagues, she decided to return to the vortex, the occupied Ukrainian territories in the East and South, from where almost no information comes out. On July 27, 2023, she left Ukraine for Poland, then Russia. His last message was on August 3, 2023.
Four years earlier, Viktoriia Roshchina had applied to a French training program in judicial journalism, her passion. “We must write objectively, going into often essential details, asking more questions, calling things by their proper names, explaining complex legal terms in human language, she then wrote in her cover letter. It’s worth talking to all parties in a trial, not being afraid to ask questions. I dream of making the coverage of the trials in Ukraine more professional.”
Danylo Kravets, prisoner of war: “Animals behave better than Russians”
For months, the young woman, shy but with a steely character, had learned the basics of legal reporting from great French reporters, like Pascale Robert-Diard, from Mondewhose words she drank in silence. Dmytro Gnap, one of its first editors-in-chief, at Hromadske TV, remembers his “fanatical dedication to his work, his ability to not care what others thought, his mad desire to punish, or at least expose, all the scum and bastards of this world”, and his inability to get along with people, as to his willingness to risk his life for justice, without the slightest hesitation.
Viktoriia Roshchina is apparently the only professional to have dared to work in the occupied territories. “I think she couldn’t have done otherwise, the documents she wrote there are invaluable, comments Nikita Galka, reporter at public television Suspilne. Journalists should not be enslaved. Are there rules and laws for the enemy?”Nobel Peace Prize winner in 2022, human rights activist Oleksandra Matviichuk asks a question: “What did they do with her? What could have been done to a young girl to make her die? I call on all journalistic organizations in different countries to officially demand a response from Russia.”
Related News :