On Thursday October 10, it became known that a Ukrainian journalist, Victoria Roshchyna died in a Russian prison. She was reporting for different Ukrainian media as well as Radio Free Europe. Victoria disappeared in August 2023 while reporting from Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. It was the second time Russians captured her. The first time was on March 16, 2022, when she was on her way to Mariupol, a Ukrainian city on the east that Russia still occupies. Victoria was detained and imprisoned, then released and returned home very soon after. But not this time.
According to Andrii Yusov, a representative of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, Russia had agreed to return Victoria to Ukraine and she was on the exchange list. That’s why she was on her way to Lefortovo, a prison in Moscow, from Taganrog. This city also houses one of the Russian prisons where Ukrainian defenders of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol are held. But on Thursday, October 10, the Russians reported Victoria had died back in September on the way to Lefortovo.
I heard the news of Victoria’s death when I was in New York with my WPI colleagues. We had so many interesting meetings there with many of the main American media outlets. And everywhere we asked about the safety of their U.S. colleagues reporting from the war and conflict zones. The meeting with The Wall Street Journal representatives was especially interesting for me. In August 2024, Russia released WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich as a part of the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War.
In July 2024, a Russian court found Evan guilty of spying and sentenced him to 16 years in prison. But we all understand that these are false accusations and slander. Journalism is not espionage. However, we have to remember that we are dealing with Russia. They’ll detain, imprison and kill whoever they want if they are not stopped.
By the way, Evan was the first American journalist to be arrested for espionage in Russia since the Cold War. That’s why many Western media are trying to reduce the presence of their journalists in Russia now. And that’s exactly what we were told by the representatives of many American media during our WPI meetings in New York and Washington, D.C.
Since the full-scale Russian war started on February 24, 2022, a total of 102 Ukrainian and foreign journalists have been killed. More than 25 Ukrainian journalists are still detained in different Russian prisons waiting for an exchange. One of them is my colleague Dmytro Khyliuk. He was working for the news agency Unian when he was detained on March 3, 2022, in his village in the Kyiv region. My Editor-in-Chief Svitlana Panyushkina was his neighbor. Svitlana and her family miraculously managed to escape from the Russian occupation. Unlike Dmytro.
According to Reporters without Borders, Dmytro is still being held in the Vladimir region of Russia.
“When I came back to Ukraine, I saw his photo and I can tell you he doesn’t look like that at all,” said Ihor, a Ukrainian prisoner who spent a year sharing a prison cell with Khyliuk. According to him, Dmytro probably weighs no more than 45 kilos (about 99 pounds) now. But he is still alive like all the other imprisoned Ukrainian journalists. Therefore, we have to fight for their release from the Russian prisons.
