- reading time: 5 min.
Viktoriia Roshchyna, lost in “the gray zone”
Her investigation into the thousands of Ukrainian civilians illegally detained by Russia cost her her life. 45 journalists continued her work.
Credit: courtesy of hromadske
By Édouard Perrin
April 29th, 2025
Forbidden Stories’ partners
The Guardian, The Washington Post, Le Monde, Die Zeit, Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel, ZDF, Tamedia, Der Standard, Important Stories, France 24, Ukrainska Pravda
Her phone stopped transmitting at the beginning of August 2023, just after she arrived for a reporting trip to the Zaporizhzhia region, in the heart of the territories captured by the Russians.
Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna wanted to tell the story of her compatriots’ suffering under Russian occupation. A few days before her departure, she wrote to Sevgil Musaieva, editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda.
“You can only understand the whole picture by going there,” she said.
“You mean to the occupied territories?” her boss wondered.
“Yes,” Viktoriia answered assuredly.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Viktoriia had only one mission, almost an obsession: to report from these occupied zones, regardless of the danger it entailed. Viktoriia was determined to give a voice and a face to the victims of the brutal occupation; document the atrocities; and above all, investigate the fate of the countless civilians who had become hostages of the repressive Russian apparatus. These “ghost prisoners” are held in secret, with no contact with the outside world, no lawyers, and often no official charges brought against them.
In a June 2023 WhatsApp message entitled “Out of reach,” Viktoriia summed up her reporting leads to Musaieva: an “examination of FSB torture chambers (…) where pro-Ukrainian citizens are held,” “stories of people who managed to get out of prison,” “the faces of FSB officers and servicemen (some recognized/identified),” “a map of places of detention,” and “the number of prisoners (official, unofficial).” Her list ended with the “gray zone (the number of missing persons).”
Not so long after, Viktoriia herself would end up in this “gray zone” of ghost prisoners, caught up in the very system she set out to investigate. Held incommunicado for months, she was set to be released in autumn 2024 in a prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine. Instead, an official letter from the Russians informed her parents that Viktoriia had died in September 2024, a few weeks before her 28th birthday.
Forbidden Stories, whose mission is to pursue and publish the work of journalists threatened, imprisoned, or killed for their work, launched the Viktoriia Project as soon as the news of her death broke. Faced with the difficulties and risks inherent in investigating such a subject, only the joint effort of journalists could help expose the illegal practices of Russian forces in occupied Ukraine. Members of the consortium led by Forbidden Stories collected more than 50 testimonies from former prisoners—both civilian and military—relatives of detainees, and legal experts in Ukraine and Russia, as well as the accounts of four Russian prison officials who defected. These testimonies were cross-checked with open-source research focused on the three detention centers where Viktoriia was allegedly held. Ukrainian intelligence documents gave the consortium the unprecedented ability to name the alleged perpetrators of torture in these and other prisons.
Until her death, Viktoriia was one of the 112 Ukrainian journalists captured and imprisoned by Russia since 2014. (As of this writing, 30 journalists remain in prison.) But her case is unique. To the best of our knowledge, she is the only journalist to die during captivity by Russian forces. Viktoriia was also one of the few journalists based in unoccupied Ukraine to report from these areas—if not the only one.
To better understand Viktoriia’s motivations, we traveled to the city of Kryvyi Rih. After months of negotiations, the journalist’s father finally agreed to meet two journalists from the Forbidden Stories consortium. Volodymyr Roshchyn is an imposing figure, but his deep, gravelly voice broke slightly as he talked about his daughter. The interview – the first given in person to journalists – lasted two and a half hours. He remembered how, as a teenager, “Vika” used to run around with a camera to report the news. From an early age, journalism was her only obsession, he told us.
Viktoriia began her newspaper career in Kyiv at the age of 16. Slim, almost frail, the young journalist with a soft, oval face had a rebellious spark. This is how her former colleagues and editors unanimously remember her.
“Vika was one of the most stubborn and nasty journalists I’ve ever met in my life,” Anna Tsyhyma, Viktoriia’s colleague at Ukrainian investigative outlet hromadske, remembered with a wistful laugh.
At hromadske, Viktoriia honed her journalistic skills as a justice reporter. She became notorious at the Kyiv Criminal Court, where she would ruthlessly question lawyers and prosecutors, never taking no for an answer. Managing Viktoriia wasn’t much easier.
“Working with Vika was sometimes complicated,” Musaieva, her editor at Ukrainska Pravda, said. Viktoriia would fight tooth and nail for every word of her articles, the first drafts of which were always far too long. “She would text me at night, early in the morning. There were no days off for her,” Musaieva said. Still, her editors decided that the public interest of her work was worth the trouble.
The Russian invasion of February 2022 increased Viktoriia’s fervor tenfold. She immediately set off to report on the invasion for hromadske, but the trip didn’t go as planned. On March 5, 2022, Viktoriia and her driver were targeted by artillery fire in the capital city of Zaporizhzhia—at the time under siege by Russian forces. Less than a week later, she was arrested by FSB agents on her way from Enerhodar to Mariupol. Detained for 10 days in the nearby town of Berdyansk, she was forced to record a video in exchange for her release. Filmed against a white background, Viktoriia thanks the Russians for saving her life. The image quality is low. Viktoriia’s voice is weak, her face tight, as if holding back tears. When she returned, her colleagues begged her to ease up. Roshchyna did the opposite. hromadske, her main employer, stopped collaborating with her, judging that she was taking ill-considered risks to travel to the occupied zone.
Undeterred, Viktoriia started freelancing for other media outlets, including Ukrainska Pravda. According to Musaieva, Viktoriia traveled to the occupied territories at least four times and never solicited assignments in advance. She would just write, “If I went to such and such a place, would you be interested?” The editor-in-chief advised against it. But a few days or weeks later, Ukrainska Pravda would receive a new draft.
Viktoriia showed the same obstinacy to those closest to her. Her father Volodymyr remembers her visiting him in Kryviy Rih just before leaving on a mission, wearing her bulletproof vest and announcing, simply, “I’m leaving.”
“I told her, ‘Stay, my daughter’” Volodymyr recounted. “She said, ‘I’ve got to go.’ How could I stop her? When she decided to do something, she did it.”