Russia’s ‘ghost detainees’: The investigation that cost Viktoriia Roshchyna her life

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Forbidden Stories continues the work of journalists who have been killed, jailed, or threatened. Forbidden Stories led the Viktoriia Project, coordinating over 45 journalists from 12 media organizations. At Rappler, we chose to republish their investigation.

Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was pronounced dead in Russian captivity in October 2024, after being secretly held for months in Russian-occupied Ukraine and a Russian prison. In February 2025, her body was repatriated. Forbidden Stories investigated her detention and death, which came on the heels of a reporting trip to Zaporizhzhia aimed at telling the stories of Ukrainian civilians unlawfully held by Russia.

Key findings:

The body of Viktoriia Roshchyna was returned to Ukraine in February 2025; the body showed marks of torture and was returned without some organs
Forbidden Stories was able to consult with two of Viktoriia’s sources in Russian-held Ukraine, and with her editor, who confirmed she had traveled to Zaporizhzhia to investigate the torture of civilians in informal detention centers
Viktoriia had begun to list the names of Russian occupiers responsible for detention and torture, including FSB agents

The bodies were unloaded by truckload, then sent to different morgues for analysis. Of the 757 corpses returned to Ukraine from Russia in February 2025, one was not like the others.

On February 25, forensic investigators in a morgue in Vinnytsia, in west-central Ukraine, pored over the tens of bodies they had been delivered. The last of them — smaller, lighter than the others — was in a white sanitary bag with the inscription “NM SPAS 757” scrawled in handwriting. The acronyms hid a coded message, in Russian: “Unnamed Male, Extensive Damage to the Coronary Arteries, [Body Number] 757.” When investigators opened the bag, a second one nestled within it, this one black.

The first bag appears to have been mislabeled. In it was the body not of another male soldier, but that of a young woman. Despite the poor condition of the corpse, investigators managed to find a small tag attached to the right shin with the words “Roshchyna, V.V.” inscribed.

After months of uncertainty — for the family — and obfuscation — by the Russians — the body of Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna had been returned.

The inclusion of Viktoriia’s frail, female corpse in the exchange of mostly male prisoners of war shouldn’t surprise. Her path was anything but ordinary.

In the summer of 2023, Viktoriia had traveled to Zaporizhzhia, in Russia-occupied Ukraine, to report on the treatment of Ukrainians in Russia’s ad hoc prisons. Her trajectory in the intervening months remains unclear, in spite of her anguished family’s search. The journalist disappeared in August 2023. For more than a year, she was shuffled between at least two informal detention centers and a Russian prison, before the announcement of her death in captivity in October 2024.

The repatriation of Viktoriia’s lifeless body to Ukraine months later marks the end of a long series of questions and false hopes about the only known Ukrainian journalist to date to die in Russian captivity.

In a letter to Forbidden Stories, Ukrainian prosecutors confirmed the return of Viktoriia’s body to Ukraine, citing a 99.999% DNA match to “close persons” in the journalist’s entourage and suggesting clear signs of torture. “The forensic examination revealed numerous signs of torture and ill-treatment on the victim’s body, including abrasions and hemorrhages on various parts of the body, a broken rib, neck injuries, and possible electric shock marks on her feet,” Yuriy Belousov, the head of the War Crimes Unit at the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s office, wrote.

Belousov added that the body had been returned “with signs of an autopsy that was performed before arrival in Ukraine” and missing certain organs — an act possibly intended to mask the cause of death and which could qualify as yet another war crime in this case.

Contacted, Viktoriia’s father said that the family had requested additional forensic analyses because they were not convinced by the initial ones.

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.

A dangerous mission

The story of Viktoriia Roshchyna’s final disappearance can only be told in flashes, second-hand testimonies and conjecture. Someone who knew someone who knew someone. Words spoken through prison walls. The hazy memories of anonymous sources and a desperate father.

Roshchyna’s story starts in the flat, industrial heartland of southeastern Ukraine: Zaporizhzhia — a place that would play a key role in her eventual disappearance. This region stretches across 27,183 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory from the Azov Sea to the Dnieper river. But since 2022, two-thirds of it has been illegally annexed by Russian forces. Today, occupied Zaporizhzhia sits behind the thick fog of an unmoving frontline, with little or no information allowed to filter out. The zone has become an informational black hole.

Vika — as her colleagues and family call her — was born in 1996 in the eponymous capital city of Zaporizhzhia, nearly five years after the dissolution of the USSR. On one of her formative reporting trips, several years before the Russian invasion, Vika covered a well-known criminal case in the coastal city of Berdyansk, now under Russian occupation. She seemed to have had a particular affinity for the occupied territories, Musaeiva, her editor, said.

Maybe that’s why she kept traveling back, even after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Between February 2022 and July 2023, she traveled to the Russian-held territories of southeastern Ukraine at least four times, according to Musaieva. On one of those trips, in March 2022, she was arrested by Russian intelligence services and held for a week in Berdyansk.

When she returned from that trip, her editors, colleagues, and family members urged her to stop going. She didn’t. In July 2023, a year and a half into the war, Vika, then 26, geared up for yet another reporting trip. By then, her vision was already quite clear. “We discussed the places where Ukrainians could be tortured, and she gave me her kind of vision of how she sees the topic,” Musaieva said. “She wanted to find those places and the people involved.”

Into the occupied territories

Vika’s plans to investigate Russia’s detention system in several cities in the Zaporizhzhia region were confirmed by two sources who met her around that time. One source, who met Vika twice in 2023, remembers that she was nervous about her investigation. “She was closed off,” Mykola, whose name has been changed because he still lives in the occupied zone, told Forbidden Stories. “She didn’t say much. I don’t know what she was afraid of, maybe of being captured by video cameras or something.”

Mykola drove Vika around the coastal city of Berdyansk, including to a seaside restaurant where she believed Russian FSB agents and officers gathered. When Vika was planning to return to the area, she texted him asking him to drive her to Enerhodar, more than 200 kilometers north of Berdyansk. This time, he refused, citing his lack of a Russian passport.

Olga, another source Forbidden Stories was able to consult with, gave us more details. In an exclusive testimony, the 59-year-old from a small town on the shores of the Azov Sea, who asked to be identified only by her first name, confirmed Vika’s progress on the investigation. According to Olga’s telling, Vika had begun to compile a list of FSB agents. “She was telling me about her experience in captivity, asking me everything, and I realized that she had a lot of information, her own database, about FSB agents,” Olga said.

Olga first met Vika in 2019. After the invasion, at great personal risk, she began to send Vika pictures from the occupied territories. The two met once in person — at a bus station in the city of Berdyansk in the summer of 2022. They planned to meet a second time, in November of that year, but Vika had to return to Ukraine abruptly for security reasons.

Despite their failed meet-up, the two kept in touch through 2023. That summer, Vika again texted her, asking for help with contacts in the occupied territories.

From there, her path is harder to trace. Vika must have traveled south through Russia to get to occupied Zaporizhzhia. According to border documents she filled out upon entering Russia, her destination was Melitopol. But the journalist first traveled to Enerhodar by way of Mariupol, according to a video investigation published in March by Ukrainian newspapers Slidstvo Info, Suspilne, and Graty, in partnership with RSF.

In early August, Vika sent another message to Mykola, her source in Berdyansk. She said she would return to the coastal city in two weeks.

Then she stopped responding.

On August 12, Ukrainian law enforcement declared Vika missing. The following month, her family filed an official case with the police and ombudsman’s office. Ukrainian intelligence began to investigate, but by then Vika had vanished.

It wasn’t until April 2024 — eight months later — that Vika was again located. She was now being held in Russia, according to a statement from the Russian Ministry of Defense shared with her father.

Details about what had happened to her since her last text message, in August 2023, are scarce — and sometimes contradictory. But signs point first to the occupied city of Enerhodar. In this small but strategically important city, known for its nuclear power plant, Vika had planned to report on Russian torture centers, according to Olga. She doesn’t appear to have made it very far in her investigation.

According to an official deposition from a cellmate in a prison where she was later held, Vika believed she was spotted by a drone in Enerhodar after dropping her backpack at the apartment she had rented. She told the cellmate she was held “for several days” in the police station in Enerhodar, used to “filter” Ukrainian civilians suspected of resisting the occupation.

Forbidden Stories was unable to independently confirm the details of the arrest. We reached out to the former cellmate, but she did not wish to respond to our questions.

Dmitry Orlov, Enerhodar’s former mayor, now in exile, told Forbidden Stories it was unlikely Vika would have been spotted by a drone; he suggested that she could have been identified through video surveillance, operated by Russian occupying forces, but did not have any proof of that.

What is more certain is that from Enerhodar, she was transferred to Melitopol, the occupied city Russia has claimed as its regional capital since its illegal annexation of two-thirds of the region in 2022. There, two testimonies situate Vika in an informal torture and detention center known, colloquially, as “the garages.”

Located in an industrial zone under a bridge that connects Melitopol’s old and new towns, “the garages” have become infamous for the inhumane treatment inflicted upon the prisoners held there illegally. One resident — the relative of a prisoner — said almost everyone in Melitopol knew someone who had been detained and tortured there. “Both men’s and women’s screams” could be heard coming from that part of town, they said.

Vika was probably not spared from this torture and may have been subjected to forced labor while in detention, Yevgeny Markevich, a Ukrainian prisoner of war who later crossed paths with Vika, said. “She was whipped and tortured on an equal basis with everyone else right there in Melitopol,” Markevich, who was not held there himself, speculated.

In her deposition to Ukrainian authorities, Vika’s former cellmate confirmed this, saying that Vika had scars appearing to be knife wounds on her arms and legs and other injuries.

Melitopol was just one stage of Vika’s descent into the labyrinthine Russian prison system. At the end of December, she was transferred further east, to a Russian city on the banks of the Azov Sea whose name had by then become synonymous with the most violent types of treatment imaginable, reminiscent of the worst Soviet gulags: Taganrog.

‘She was not afraid of death’

Several months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in May 2022, a former juvenile detention center had opened its doors to Ukrainian prisoners of war. This walled fortress in the city of Taganrog — its outside painted an unassuming chartreuse green — is the pre-trial detention center SIZO-2.

In SIZO-2, grizzled soldiers are beaten so badly upon arrival — a process known as “reception” — that four have immediately dropped dead, according to information provided by a source in Ukrainian intelligence. In total, 15 Ukrainian prisoners have allegedly died in SIZO-2 as of fall 2024, according to the same source.

It was here that the diminutive Vika spent nearly nine months, from late December 2023 until early September 2024. She shared a small cell with three other civilian women, according to Markevich, whose cell was two doors down from hers. Markevich remembers hearing her voice during the daily room checks, often yelling at the guards. “She called them ‘executioners, murderers,’” Markevich said. “Personally, I admired it. None of us were like that. No one I know could have done that to themselves. She was not afraid of [death].”

At Taganrog, jailers have carte blanche for all forms of abuse and cruelty, which it’s unlikely Viktoriia escaped. Ten former detainees described to Forbidden Stories a facility in which torture was institutionalized. They recounted beatings, electric shocks, being dunked in water to the point of near-drowning, and other forms of violent and humiliating treatment. According to Mykhailo Chaplya, a POW held at Taganrog and released in September 2024, interrogators were told to push the limits of the pain inflicted on prisoners, but not kill them. When it came to Vika, he suggested that they had overdone it. “They pushed it too far,” he said. “They are interested in [prisoners] being alive, but in a very bad condition. [Keeping a prisoner alive] is a means for them to have an exchange.”

By summer 2024, the journalist’s health was declining and she wasn’t eating. At that point, Vika was hospitalized. “She was in such a state that she could not even lift her head off the pillow,” her cellmate said in a deposition to Ukrainian authorities.

Another former detainee at Taganrog who encountered Vika there confirmed this. “They didn’t give a damn until she felt completely shitty, and at that point, they somehow took her out,” they said. “A doctor came, examined her and hospitalized her. No one knows where. She came back with a ‘butterfly’ on her arm — they’d put her on an IV drip and forced her to eat.”

A violent death?

In late August 2024, several months after Vika’s hospitalization, Volodymyr Roshchyn’s phone rang from a Russian number. When he picked up the phone, he heard his daughter Vika’s voice for the first time in over a year.

Viktoriia was speaking Russian, not Ukrainian, which meant that she was not alone, Volodymyr said. He spoke to Forbidden Stories in a wide-ranging interview in Kryvyi Rih, the small city in Eastern Ukraine where he still lives to the steady tune of Russian missiles launched from just over the border with Russia. “She said, ‘I was promised that I would be home in September,’ and that we should get ready to meet her,” Volodymyr recalled.

In the short conversation that followed, Volodymr and his wife encouraged Vika to eat. Vika assured her parents that she was; then she wished them goodbye. When Volodymr tried to call the number back, he got an automated response.

According to Yevgenia Kapalkina, the family’s lawyer, the phone call was the result of “high-level” negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian sides. To the family, the call seemed to portend Vika’s imminent release. Musaieva, her editor, said that she spoke with a foreign journalist who had learned from intelligence sources that Vika would be released in the next prisoner swap, scheduled for mid-September. But two weeks later, when a busload of Ukrainian POWs returned to Kyiv, Vika was not among them.

As the days passed, and the calendar flipped to October, hope began to fade. Could Vika have disappeared once again?

But then in October, Volodymr received an email from the Russian Ministry of Defense. In terse, formal language, the letter announced his daughter’s death in Russian captivity. The date of death given: September 19.

For now, the only clues as to the cause and timing of her death may be written on the body itself and in the whispers of former detainees.

In its return, Viktoriia’s body was in bad shape; it had been frozen and mummified. The bruising on the neck was consistent with a possibly broken hyoid bone, a rare fracture commonly associated with strangulation, according to a source close to the official investigation.

Ukrainian investigators have refrained thus far from assessing the cause of death. That’s because, according to that same source, Vika’s body was returned with several body parts removed, including parts of the brain, the larynx, and eyeballs — consistent with a possible attempt to hide the cause of death.

Could Vika have been strangled to death on the way to her release? Did her brain hemorrhage? Did something go wrong on the way to exchange, or were these old injuries?

According to multiple sources, Viktoriia was removed from her cell on September 8 — nearly two weeks before the official date of death. But for now, neither the prosecution, nor Forbidden Stories has been able to determine what happened during that period.

None of the Russian officials solicited by the consortium — the Kremlin, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), as well as several Taganrog higher-ups — responded to our requests for comment.

The former detainee at Taganrog who crossed paths with Vika remembered that day. “[With the help of another prisoner,] she went down when they were supposed to exchange her,” the detainee said. “After that, a security officer came and said that the journalist never made it to the exchange: ‘It’s her own fault.’”

Volodymyr Roshchyn, Vika’s father, still refuses to believe his daughter has died. He and his wife are still waiting on additional forensic analyses requested days before the publication of this project.

“I still do not know what happened to her, and why she was not included in the exchange on September 13, 2024,” he said. “All this time my family supports me, we pray for Vika and believe everything will be fine.” (To be concluded) – Rappler.com

NEXT: Part 2 | Lost in the Gray Zone: How Russia secretly disappears thousands of Ukrainian civilians

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