The trade passed off on a lonely forest street in February. Shifting alongside a line of refrigerated lorries, the groups in hazmat fits went about their grim work: making ready the stays of 757 Ukrainian navy casualties handed over by Russia for the journey again to Kyiv.
Clipboards in hand, intermediaries from the Pink Cross checked their lists. For every physique shrouded in white plastic, the Russians had offered a quantity, a reputation, a location, generally a reason for demise. After which, on the very backside of the final web page, a thriller entry: “NM SPAS 757.” The letters had been abbreviations, taken to imply “unidentified man” and “intensive injury to the coronary arteries”.
It could be weeks earlier than officers may verify what the Guardian and its reporting companions are publishing at the moment. The unlabelled stays had been these of a lady. Not a soldier, both, however some of the high-profile civilians detained for the reason that full-scale invasion.
The journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was captured in the summertime of 2023 close to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear energy station. It was at the very least her fourth reporting journey into the occupied territories. She was by this stage of the struggle the one Ukrainian journalist ready to danger crossing the frontline in an effort to pierce the data blackout imposed by Russia.
Roshchyna died after a 12 months in detention, aged 27.
Info on the circumstances of her demise is restricted. Roshchyna was held with out cost and with out entry to a lawyer. Throughout her detention, her solely identified contact with the skin world was a four-minute telephone name to her mother and father, a full 12 months after she was taken.
Preliminary forensics counsel “quite a few indicators of torture”, in response to the prosecutor. Burn marks on her toes from electrical shocks, abrasions on the hips and head, and a damaged rib. Her hair, which she favored to put on lengthy and tinted blonde on the suggestions, had been shaved.
Sources near the official investigation have additionally disclosed that the hyoid bone in her neck was damaged. It’s the sort of injury that may happen throughout strangulation. Nevertheless, the precise reason for demise could by no means be identified as a result of when her physique was returned in the course of the trade on 14 February, sure elements had been lacking, specifically the mind, eyes and larynx.
A struggle crimes investigation has been opened with a view to prosecuting these accountable.
There have been additionally witnesses to her struggling. The Guardian, working with media companions together with Roshchyna’s writer, Ukrainska Pravda, in a collaboration led by the French newsroom Forbidden Tales, has tracked down first-hand testimonies to reconstruct the occasions that led to Roshchyna’s seize, and the small print of her therapy in detention.
This account, a part of the Viktoriia mission, is a part of an investigation into the kidnapping and systematic torture of what Ukraine believes could possibly be as many as 16,000 of its civilians, the second a part of which can be revealed on Wednesday.
Most of these detained are being held with out cost. The circumstances of their detention represent a suspected struggle crime, and proof is being gathered for eventual prosecutions.
The detained are support employees, journalists, enterprise house owners, native politicians, church leaders, and anybody suspected of resisting the invasion. They’re being held at greater than 180 amenities within the occupied territories and inside Russia itself. And but, in all of the noise round peace talks, they’re not often talked about. It’s a topic Roshchyna felt was under-reported, and it was the main target of her final mission.
The details about her remaining months has been gathered because of greater than 50 interviews with survivors of Russian captivity in addition to the households of a few of these nonetheless held. Authorized sources working inside Russia and the occupied territories have additionally shared data, as have jail officers who resigned from the service in misery over what that they had witnessed.
Whereas questions stay, one factor is for certain: Roshchyna fell sufferer to the very crimes she had got down to expose.
Recognized to her household as Vika, Roshchyna grew up within the shadow of struggle. Her father was a veteran of the Soviet struggle in Afghanistan, and he or she was 17 when Russia annexed Crimea. She and her sister had been raised in the identical city as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Kryvyi Rih, the place her mother and father nonetheless reside, was 30 miles from the Russian advance into southern Ukraine in 2022.
Colleagues stated she was obsessive about work and uncompromising. “She had no life past her job, no pals, no companion. But additionally doing extraordinary work. For her it was a mission,” stated Sevhil Musaieva, the editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda. “She was one of many bravest journalists I met in my profession.”
To guard her sources, Roshchyna used a number of telephones. She would set her messages to vanish, and her articles had been written in recordsdata that might additionally self-delete. Roshchyna herself would vanish for weeks at a time, re-emerging to file her stories.
In March 2022, whereas reporting from the occupied metropolis of Berdiansk, she had a primary brush with hazard. Captured by a soldier and turned over to brokers of the Russian Federal Safety Service (FSB), she was coerced into recording a propaganda video and let go just a few days later, after a public outcry.
On her return dwelling, colleagues urged her to relaxation and search remedy. Her way of thinking was fragile and he or she was very skinny, they recalled.
However Roshchyna continued to cross the frontline. She uncovered the intimidation of employees protecting the Zaporizhzhia nuclear energy station working, and investigated the capturing of two 16-year-old boys who had dared to oppose the occupation.
Musaieva stated that on Roshchyna’s final journey she was on the lookout for the placement of black websites, basements or industrial buildings the place Russian safety operatives systematically used torture to interrogate civilians or coerce them into false confessions. She was constructing a listing of the FSB brokers accountable.
Melitopol ‘garages’
Roshchyna left Ukraine for the final time on 25 July 2023, taking a roundabout route into the occupied territories as a result of there have been no protected passages over the frontline. At 2.09pm that day, her telephone linked to a Polish cellular community. From Poland, she travelled by means of Lithuania and north into Latvia.
A photograph of her passport and her entrance type, obtained by this investigation, suggests she entered Russia from Latvia, underneath her personal identify, through the Ludonka border crossing. The cardboard states she was heading to the town of Melitopol. She travelled 1,000 miles south by means of Russia, crossing into occupied Ukraine just a few days later.
On 3 August, only a few days into her journey, her father, Volodymyr Roshchyn, raised the alarm after realising she had stopped checking in to her on-line messaging accounts.
Info he has gathered, along with the accounts of three individuals held with Roshchyna at a infamous jail within the Russian coastal city of Taganrog, simply contained in the Russian border, factors to what occurred subsequent.
One of many witnesses was her cellmate, who was launched final September and recorded her testimony on video for the prosecutor. She has requested to not be named, to guard herself and her household.
Roshchyna seems to have rented an residence in Enerhodar, the dormitory city subsequent to the Zaporizhzhia energy plant. She paid prematurely for 3 nights and, leaving her backpack behind, went out to seek for black websites.
The journalist instructed her cellmate she thought she had been noticed by a drone. A police automobile arrived and he or she was taken to the police station, a five-storey constructing lined in pockmarked blue tiles the place the home windows are bolstered with steel grilles. She was held there for a number of days earlier than being moved 80 miles (130km) south to Melitopol.
The identify interprets as metropolis of honey, and the realm is legendary for its cherry orchards. In the course of the occupation, it performed a far darker function. “In Melitopol there’s a massive focus of FSB and so they have these momentary detention centres,” stated a European intelligence official acquainted with the scenario within the occupied territories. In a course of referred to as filtration, the FSB triages captives, relying on how helpful it deems them to be. Roshchyna is prone to have been thought-about a particular case, given the data she was gathering.
The prosecutor believes she was taken to a black website in Melitopol referred to as the “garages”, and in response to her cellmate’s testimony, Roshchyna later recounted how she was tortured there. Her physique was lined in bruises. “Throughout interrogations, they used electrical shocks … She received stabbed just a few instances – I noticed them on her: arm for positive, leg too … Recent knife scar – forearm, delicate tissue between wrist and elbow. A scar of roughly 3cm, pierced by means of. She stated one man, she known as him a jerk … was brutal, unhinged.
“On her leg, above the heel – I noticed that too, 5cm wound. She stated: ‘I instructed them to not contact my leg … I begged them to not contact that wound.’”
In the direction of the tip of 2023, Roshchyna was instructed by an FSB officer she named as Maxim Moroz that she could be transferred to a different jail and was promised higher therapy there. In accordance with witnesses, she was transported alone, by Jeep, to Taganrog. Right here, she was detained at a pre-trial detention centre referred to as Sizo 2.
Refusing meals
“She arrived already pumped filled with unknown medicine,” stated a second detainee who encountered Roshchyna at Taganrog, who can’t be named for safety causes. “She arrived and he or she mainly began to go loopy.”
The Guardian will publish a separate, detailed account of the abuses inflicted on Ukrainians held at Taganrog. The circumstances there have been among the many worst seen at any of the various detention amenities operated by Russia.
Ukrainian intelligence has recorded 15 fatalities on the jail, based mostly on data from launched troops. Within the torture rooms, troopers and civilians had been water-boarded, crushed and shocked in an electrical chair. When exterior their cells, they had been compelled to undertake a stress place referred to as the swan – bent ahead with their palms clasped behind their again at chest stage. Meals was severely rationed, with 4 and a half spoonfuls per plate, in response to one detainee who counted.
For Roshchyna, the impact was catastrophic. She stopped consuming. “We might speak to her however she was misplaced in her head, eyes terrified,” recalled the primary witness, her cellmate. Roshchyna would lie “curled up foetal on the ground” behind a curtain that screened the bathroom, out of sight of the guards.
Her weight dropped to 30kg (lower than 5st). “She may rise up, however solely with me serving to as she was in such a state that she couldn’t even raise her head off the pillow. I might prop her up and he or she would seize the highest bunk to drag herself upright,” her cellmate stated.
Yevgeny Markevich, a soldier now in rehabilitation in Ukraine after a prisoner trade, stated: “She didn’t formally declare a starvation strike, she merely started to refuse meals.” . He stated he noticed her as soon as however heard her most days as she was held close to to him, in cell 115. “At first she defined it by saying that it was for spiritual causes, fasting or one thing, then she started to say that she couldn’t [eat] for well being causes.”
Roshchyna’s toes and legs swelled, in response to her cellmate’s testimony. She was supplied coronary heart capsules however seems to have refused these. Coronary heart issues and fluid retention within the leg tissues are each indicators of hunger.
In June, she was carried out on a stretcher. She spent a number of weeks at a hospital in Taganrog the place, in response to witnesses, she was watched over by six masked guards armed with machine weapons. The extent of safety, and the efforts made to maintain her alive, counsel Moscow noticed her as a helpful negotiating pawn. In July, she was reportedly despatched again to Taganrog with an IV drip in her arm. It appears she continued to refuse meals.
The pinnacle of the jail requested her cellmates what she favored to eat, and separate meals had been cooked for her. Witnesses say she was supplied bananas and sweets.
In April 2024, her household had acquired the first official affirmation that Roshchyna was alive, in a letter from the Russian defence ministry. It acknowledged solely that she “has been detained and is at the moment within the territory of the Russian Federation”.
Colleagues started pulling strings. A message was despatched to the Vatican, the place Pope Francis, who had been capable of talk with Russia by means of backchannels, agreed to ask for her identify to be added to the prisoner trade record.
Phrase finally reached her editor that she was to be launched. In the direction of the tip of August, Roshchyna was allowed to telephone dwelling. Her mother and father had been instructed by the Ukrainian negotiators she was on starvation strike. They stored their mobiles switched on all day, ready for her name. When she lastly got here on the road, Roshchyna was talking in Russian. “I used to be promised that I might be dwelling in September,” she instructed them. Her father urged her to eat. Then she stated her farewells. “Effectively, that’s it. Bye, bye. Mother, Dad, I like you.”
‘Not within the databases’
On 13 September, bathed in autumn sunshine, 49 prisoners of struggle stepped off a coach from Russia on to Ukrainian soil. A welcome celebration met them with flags and bouquets of yellow sunflowers wrapped in blue tissue paper. Roshchyna’s cellmate was there, together with at the very least two different males held at Taganrog. However the journalist was lacking.
Precisely why has by no means been made clear. On 8 September, Roshchyna was taken from her cell, prepared for the lengthy journey again to Ukraine. The nameless Taganrog detainee was one of many final to see her alive.
“We requested a lady from the cell to assist her go down. Along with her assist, she went down once they had been speculated to trade her. After that, a safety officer got here and stated that the journalist by no means made it to the trade. The officer added: ‘It’s her personal fault.’”
Some weeks later, the deputy head of Russia’s navy police wrote to Roshchyna’s father to say she had died on 19 September.
When Roshchyna’s physique was finally returned, it was in such unhealthy situation that visible identification was tough. Nevertheless, hooked up to her leg, examiners discovered a tag with the handwritten inscription “V.V. Roshchyna”, and the DNA check was a match along with her mother and father.
Her father, in his grief, refuses to simply accept she is gone. He has requested extra examinations. And he has continued to put in writing letters, together with to Taganrog, demanding data. The Sizo director, Aleksandr Shtoda, has replied twice claiming Roshchyna was by no means there. His most up-to-date response, in January, acknowledged she “shouldn’t be and was not listed within the databases”.
In November 2022, Roshchyna described what motivated her. She had been given an award for braveness by the Worldwide Girls’s Media Basis, however she didn’t need to cease work to attend the ceremony in Los Angeles and so she despatched a message, hailing her colleagues.
“We’ve got remained devoted to our mission, to convey the reality to the world, countering Russian propaganda,” she stated. “Sadly, many journalists have died. I need to dedicate this award to them. In any case, they died within the struggle for the reality, attempting to document Russian crimes. I thank them.”
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