The bodies were unloaded from trucks and sent to different morgues for analysis. Of the 757 bodies returned to Ukraine from Russia in February 2025, one was not like the others.
On February 25, forensic investigators at a morgue in Vinnitsa, in central-western Ukraine, meticulously examined the dozens of bodies they had received. The last one was in a white medical bag with the handwritten inscription “NM SPAS 757.”
The initials corresponded to a coded message in Russian: “Unnamed male, extensive damage to coronary arteries, [body number] 757.” When the investigators opened the bag, they found a second black bag inside it.
Inside was the body of a young woman. Despite the poor condition of the corpse, investigators managed to find a small tag attached to the right tibia. It read: “Roshchyna, V.V.”
After months of uncertainty for the family and obscurity from the Russians, the body of Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna had been returned.
The inclusion of Viktoriia’s fragile female body in the prisoner exchange, mostly involving men, should not come as a surprise. Her journey was anything but ordinary.
In the summer of 2023, Viktoriia traveled to Zaporiyia, in Russian-occupied Ukraine, to report on the treatment of Ukrainians in the prisons set up by the Russians to confine captured enemies. Her path in the following months remains unclear, despite her family’s desperate search. The journalist disappeared in August 2023. For over a year, she went through at least two informal detention centers and a Russian prison before her death in captivity was announced 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 regarding the only known Ukrainian journalist who died 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 with “close relatives” and suggesting clear signs of torture. “The forensic examination revealed numerous signs of torture and mistreatment on the victim’s body, including abrasions and hemorrhages in various parts, a broken rib, neck injuries, and possible electric shock marks on the feet,” wrote Yuriy Belousov, head of the War Crimes Unit of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office.
Belousov added that the corpse had been returned “with signs of an autopsy performed before arriving in Ukraine” and that some organs were missing, an act possibly aimed at obscuring the cause of death and could be classified as an additional war crime in this case.
When contacted, Viktoriia’s father and lawyer stated they do not acknowledge the initial forensic analysis and are awaiting new tests.
The announcement of the journalist’s death in October 2024 marked the beginning of the Viktoriia Project. Forbidden Stories made two trips to Ukraine. Over three months, they joined forces with 45 journalists from 13 media outlets to trace Viktoriia in occupied Ukraine and Russia. Forbidden Stories, which aims to continue the work left undone by murdered, imprisoned, or threatened journalists, also pushed forward with Viktoriia’s unfinished reporting on the so-called Ghost Prisoners of Russia, the approximately 16,000 to 20,000 civilians trapped in the extensive Russian system of detention centers and informal prisons.
“Viktoriia was the only reporter covering the occupied territories. For her, it was a mission,” said Sevgil Musaieva, her editor at Ukrainska Pravda. “She was the bridge between Ukraine and those territories, providing essential information about life there. After her disappearance, there has been no coverage of what’s happening.”
Viktoriia had traveled to Russian-occupied Ukraine to report on the stories of these ghost prisoners; then, she became one herself.
In the Wolf’s Mouth
The story of Viktoriia Roshchyna’s final disappearance can only be told in flashes, secondhand accounts, and conjectures. Someone who knew someone who knew someone. Words spoken through the prison walls. Blurry memories from anonymous sources and a desperate father.
Roshchyna’s story begins in the flat and industrial heart of southeastern Ukraine: Zaporiyia, a place that would play a key role in her disappearance. This region spans 27,183 square kilometers of Ukrainian territory, from the Sea of Azov to the Dnieper River. But since 2022, two-thirds of it has been illegally annexed by Russian forces. Today, occupied Zaporiyia lies behind the thick fog of an immobile frontline, with little to no information able to seep through. The area has become an informational black hole.
Vika, as her colleagues and family call her, was born in 1996 in Zaporiyia, the capital of the same name, almost five years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In one of her training trips as a reporter, several years before the Russian invasion, Vika covered a well-known criminal case in the coastal city of Berdiansk, now under Russian occupation. She seemed to have a special affinity for the occupied territories, according to Musaieva, her editor.
Perhaps that’s why she kept traveling even after the large-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. According to Musaieva, between February 2022 and July 2023, Vika traveled at least four times to the southeastern territories of Ukraine controlled by Russia. On one of those trips in March 2022, she was arrested by Russian intelligence and held for a week in Berdiansk.
When she returned from that trip, her editors, colleagues, and family urged her to stop going. She ignored them. In July 2023, a year and a half into the war, Vika, then 26, prepared for another reporting trip. By then, her vision was already quite clear. “We talked about places where Ukrainians could be tortured, and she shared her perspective on the issue,” Musaieva recounts. “She wanted to find those places and the people involved.”
Vika’s plans to investigate the Russian detention system in several cities of Zaporiyia were confirmed by two sources who knew her at that time. One source, who met Vika twice in 2023, recalls that she was nervous about her investigation. “She was closed off,” said Mykola, whose name has been changed for safety reasons. “She didn’t talk much. I don’t know what she was afraid of, maybe of being caught on video or something.”
Mykola drove Vika around Berdiansk, even to a seaside restaurant where he believed Russian secret service agents, FSB, gathered. When Vika planned to return to the area, she messaged him asking for a ride to Energodar, over 200 kilometers north of Berdiansk. This time he refused, claiming he lacked a Russian passport.
Olga, another source Forbidden Stories consulted, provided more details. In an exclusive testimony, this 59-year-old woman from a small town by the Sea of Azov, who requested to be identified only by her first name, confirmed Vika’s progress in her investigation. According to Olga, Vika had started compiling a list of FSB agents. “She would tell me her experiences in captivity, asking me everything, and I realized she had a lot of information, her own database, about FSB agents,” Olga said.
Olga met Vika in 2019. After the invasion, running a significant personal risk, she began sending Vika photographs from the occupied territories. The two met once in person at a bus station in Berdiansk in summer 2022. They were supposed to meet again in November that year, but Vika had to abruptly return to Ukraine for security reasons.
Despite the setback, they kept in contact during 2023. That summer, Vika messaged her again, asking for help with her contacts in the occupied territories.
From there, her path becomes harder to trace. Vika must have traveled south to Russia to reach occupied Zaporiyia. According to the border documents she filled out upon entering Russia, her destination was Melitopol. But the journalist first traveled to Energodar via Mariupol, according to a video investigation published in March by Ukrainian newspapers Slidstvo Info, Suspilne, and Graty, in collaboration with Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
In early August, Vika sent another message to Mykola, her source in Berdiansk. She said she would return to the coastal city in two weeks.
Then she stopped responding.
On August 12, Ukrainian security forces declared Vika missing. The following month, her family filed an official case with the police and the ombudsman’s office. Ukrainian intelligence began investigating, but by then Vika had already disappeared.
Martyrdom in Taganrog
It was not until April 2024—eight months later—that Vika was located again. She was now being held in Russia, according to a statement from the Russian Ministry of Defense shared with her father.
Details on what had happened to her since her last text message in August 2023 are scarce and sometimes contradictory. But the clues point primarily to the occupied city of Energodar. In this small but strategically important city, known for its nuclear plant, Vika had intended to do a report on Russian torture centers, according to Olga. It seems she hadn’t gotten very far in her investigation.
According to an official statement from a former cellmate in the prison where she was later detained, Vika believed she had been seen by a drone in Energodar after leaving her backpack in the apartment she had rented. She told her she was held for “several days” at the Energodar police station, which the Russians use to filter out Ukrainian civilians suspected of resisting the occupation.
Forbidden Stories has been unable to independently confirm the details of the detention. We contacted the former cellmate, but she declined to answer our questions.
Dmitry Orlov, former mayor of Energodar, now in exile, told Forbidden Stories that it was unlikely Vika had been located by a drone; he suggested she might have been identified through the video surveillance systems operated by Russian occupation forces, but he had no proof of that.
Most likely, she was then transferred to Melitopol, the occupied city that Russia claims as its regional capital since its illegal annexation of the region in 2022. There, two testimonies place Vika in an informal torture and detention center known, colloquially, as the garages.
Located in an industrial area under a bridge connecting the old and new cities of Melitopol, the garages have become notorious for the inhumane treatment inflicted on prisoners held there illegally. A resident—a relative of a detainee—said that almost everyone in Melitopol knew someone who had been detained and tortured there. “You could hear the screams of men and women coming from that part of the city.”
Vika likely did not escape this torture and may have been subjected to forced labor during her detention, according to Yevgeny Markevich, a Ukrainian prisoner of war who later crossed paths with Vika, speaking to a member of the Forbidden Stories consortium. “Right there, in Melitopol, she was whipped and tortured just like everyone else,” speculated Markevich, who was not detained there.
In her statement to Ukrainian authorities, Vika’s former cellmate confirmed this, stating that Vika had scars appearing to be knife wounds on her hands and other injuries.
Melitopol was just a stage in Vika’s descent within the labyrinthine Russian penitentiary system. By late December, she was transferred further east to a Russian city by the Sea of Azov, whose name had by then become synonymous with the most violent imaginable treatment, reminiscent of the worst Soviet gulags: Taganrog.
In May 2022, a few months after Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine, an old juvenile detention center opened its doors to Ukrainian prisoners of war. This walled fortress in the city of Taganrog, its exterior painted a muted Chartreuse green—referencing a French herbal liqueur—is the SIZO-2 pre-trial detention center.
At SIZO-2, aged soldiers receive such brutal treatment upon arrival—a process known as intake—that four have reportedly died immediately, according to sources from Ukrainian intelligence. In total, 15 Ukrainian prisoners are said to have died in SIZO-2 by fall 2024, according to the same source.
It was here that the petite Vika spent almost 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 recalls hearing her voice during daily room checks, often screaming at the guards. “She called them ‘executioners, murderers’,” Markevich said. “I personally admired her. None of us were like that. No one I know could have done that. She wasn’t afraid [of death].”
In Taganrog, the jailers have free rein to commit all sorts of abuses and cruelties, from which Roshchyna likely did not escape. Ten former detainees described to Forbidden Stories facilities where torture was institutionalized. They recounted beatings, electric shocks, suspension upside down for long periods, and other forms of violent and humiliating treatment. According to Mykhailo Chaplya, a prisoner of war held in Taganrog and released in September 2024, interrogators were told to push the limits of pain inflicted on prisoners, risking their lives. In Vika’s case, he suggested that they may have gone too far. “They took it too far,” he said. “They’re interested in keeping [the prisoners] alive, but in very poor conditions. Keeping a prisoner alive is for them a means to achieve an exchange.”
In summer 2024, the journalist’s health deteriorated, and she was not eating. At that time, Vika was hospitalized. “She was in such a state that she couldn’t even lift her head off the pillow,” stated her cellmate in a declaration to Ukrainian authorities.
Another former detainee who encountered Vika in Taganrog confirmed this. “They didn’t care at all until she felt completely ill, and at that moment, somehow, they took her out,” he said. “A doctor came, examined her, and hospitalized her. No one knows where. She returned with a butterfly on her arm: they had set an intravenous line and forced her to eat.”
A Body with a Number
At the end of August 2024, several months after Vika’s hospitalization, Volodymyr Roshchyn’s phone rang from a Russian number. When he picked up, he heard his daughter Vika’s voice for the first time in over a year.
Viktoriia spoke in Russian, not Ukrainian, which meant she was not alone, Volodymyr said. Volodymyr spoke with Forbidden Stories in an extensive interview in Kryvyi Rih, the small eastern Ukrainian town where he still lives under the constant sound of Russian missiles fired from the border with Russia. “She told me, ‘I was promised that I would return home in September,’ and that we should prepare to meet,” Volodymyr remembers.
In the brief conversation that followed, Volodymyr and his wife encouraged Vika to eat. Vika assured her parents that she was, then she said goodbye. When Volodymyr tried to call back, he received an automatic response.
According to Yevgenia Kapalkina, the family’s lawyer, the call was the result of “high-level” negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian parties. For the family, the call seemed to herald the imminent release of Vika. Musaieva, her editor, said she had spoken with a foreign journalist who learned from intelligence sources that Vika would be released in the upcoming prisoner swap scheduled for mid-September. But two weeks later, when a bus full of Ukrainian prisoners of war returned to Kyiv, Vika was not among them.
As days passed and the calendar turned to October, hope began to fade. Could Vika have disappeared once again?
But in October, Volodymyr received an email from the Russian Ministry of Defense. In a brief and formal language, the letter announced the death of his daughter in captivity. The date of death: September 19, 2024.
For now, the only clues about the cause and timing of her death may be written on the body itself and in the whispers of former detainees.
Upon her return, Viktoriia’s body was in poor condition; it had been frozen and mummified. The bruising around the neck corresponded to a possible fracture of the hyoid bone, a rare fracture usually associated with strangulation, according to a source close to the official investigation.
Ukrainian investigators have so far refrained from assessing the cause of death. This is because, according to that same source, Vika’s body was returned with several body parts removed, including pieces of the brain, larynx, and eyeballs, which aligns with a possible attempt to conceal the cause of death.
Could Vika have died of strangulation on her way to liberation? Did she have a brain hemorrhage? Did something happen on the way to the exchange, or were these old injuries?
According to multiple sources, Viktoriia was taken from her cell on September 8, almost two weeks before the official date of her death. But for now, neither the prosecutor’s office nor Forbidden Stories have been able to determine what occurred during that period.
None of the Russian officials consulted by the consortium—the Kremlin, the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), as well as several senior officials from Taganrog—responded to our requests for comments.
The former detainee in Taganrog who crossed paths with Vika recalled that day. “[With the help of another inmate] she was taken down when she was supposed to be exchanged,” the detainee said. “Then a security officer came and said the journalist didn’t reach the exchange: ‘It’s your fault.’”
Volodymyr Roshchyna, Vika’s father, still clings to hope. The family and their lawyer are still awaiting a second DNA analysis, as well as other forensic evidence.
“I still don’t know what happened to her, and why she wasn’t included in the exchange on September 13, 2024,” he said. “All this time, my family supports me; we pray for Vika and believe that everything will turn out fine.”
