When Viktoriia Roshchyna was 26 years old, Russia announced the annexation of several regions in Ukraine, including Zaporizhzhia, her birthplace. Now, Zaporizhzhia “sits behind the thick fog of an unmoving frontline,” Phineas Rueckert and Tetiana Pryimachuk write for Forbidden Stories. “The zone has become an informational black hole.” In 2023, Roshchyna set out to enter occupied Zaporizhzhia, to report on a network of detention centers where thousands of Ukrainian people have been imprisoned and tortured. She quickly disappeared; a year later, the Russian Ministry of Defense notified Viktoriia’s father of her death in custody. Forbidden Stories, which takes up the unfinished work of silenced and murdered journalists, recently published The Viktoriia Project, a 45-person investigative effort detailing the detention network Roshchyna sought to reveal. This graphic, disturbing profile of Roshchyna underscores the perils of documenting state violence and the unimaginable bravery required to persist. A vital act, but one of horrific sacrifice.
The announcement of the journalist’s death in October 2024 was the starting point of the Viktoriia Project. Forbidden Stories traveled twice to Ukraine. Over the course of three months, we combined forces with 45 journalists from 13 news outlets to trace Viktoriia’s path into occupied Ukraine and Russia. Forbidden Stories, whose mission is to pursue the work of journalists who are killed, imprisoned, or threatened, also took forward her unfinished work on Russia’s “ghost detainees” – the estimated 16,000 to 20,000 civilians swept up into Russia’s sprawling system of informal detention centers and prisons.
“Viktoriia was the only reporter who covered the occupied territories. For her, it was a mission,” Sevgil Musaieva, her editor at online news outlet Ukrainska Pravda said. “She was the bridge between Ukraine and those territories who provided this critical information about life [there]. After she disappeared, there is no coverage of what is happening.” Viktoriia had traveled to Russian-occupied Ukraine to report on the stories of these “ghost detainees”; then, she became one of them.
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