Ukrainian freelance journalist Viktoria Roshchina died on September 19, 2024, while being transferred from the southwestern Russian city of Taganrog to the capital Moscow for a prisoner exchange, according to an October 2024 letter from the Russian defense ministry to her father.
Roshchina, who covered the war in Ukraine for several Ukrainian media outlets, went missing on August 3, 2023, after traveling to eastern Ukraine to report on claims of Ukrainian civilians being unlawfully held by Russia.
In April 2024, Russia confirmed the 27-year-old’s detention but her whereabouts remained unknown for six months, until Russia announced that she was dead.
On October 11, 2024, Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office launched an investigation into Roshchina’s death under Part 2 of Article 438 of the criminal code, which pertains to the “violation of the laws and customs of war combined with intentional murder.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists and other media and civil society organizations, welcomed Ukraine’s investigation and demanded that Russian authorities conduct their own.
In addition, 270 media representatives signed a statement urging the United Nations and other international organizations to protect Ukrainian journalists held by Russia.
“Knowing that Viktoria Roshchina had been in captivity for over a year and that she was physically healthy before her imprisonment by Russian forces, we have every reason to believe that her death was either the result of intentional murder or a consequence of the cruel treatment and violence she suffered while in Russian captivity,” it said.
On February 14, 2025, Roshchina’s body was returned to Ukraine and identified through DNA testing.
A March 2025 investigation by the Ukrainian media outlet Slidstvo.Info alleged that Roshchina was captured in August 2023, detained in the Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia region, and tortured with a knife and electric shocks.
Roshchina was later transferred to a detention center in Taganrog, where her weight dropped to only 30 kilograms (66 pounds), Slidsvto.Info reported. Prison staff hid her during inspections by the Russian ombudsman, and no charges were ever brought against her, the investigation said.
Roshchina was last seen on September 8, 2024, when she was taken from her cell to an unknown location, according to Slidsvto.Info and Forbidden Stories, a network that continues the work of journalists who have been silenced.
“They were supposed to exchange her,” a former detainee at Taganrog who crossed paths with the journalist told Forbidden Stories. “After that, a security officer came and said that the journalist never made it to the exchange: ‘It’s her own fault,’” the April 2025 investigation reported.
In April 2025, a Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office representative told the independent outlet Ukrainska Prava that Roshchina’s body showed “signs of torture and ill-treatment,” including abrasions, hemorrhages, a broken rib, but they had not yet established the cause of death. The forensic team also saw “possible signs of electric shock,” it said.
This was because Roshchina’s body “had been frozen and was in a state of mummification,” according to Forbidden Stories. Her corpse had “several body parts removed, including parts of the brain, the larynx, and eyeballs – consistent with a possible attempt to hide the cause of death,” it reported, adding that “bruising on the neck was consistent with a possibly broken hyoid bone, a rare fracture commonly associated with strangulation.”
The body bag was labeled “Unnamed Male, Extensive Damage to the Coronary Arteries, [Body Number] 757,” it said.
In a December 27, 2024, letter the Taganrog detention center told CPJ its records showed that Roshchina had not been held at that facility.
Roshchina was previously detained by Russian forces for 10 days in March 2022 while reporting in southeastern Ukraine. That same month, Russian forces in the Zaporizhzhia region fired on her vehicle.
CPJ’s emails in April 2025 to the Russian Ministry of Defense and Ukraine’s Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War about Roshchina did not receive a response.