Viktoria Roshchyna reported from places most other Ukrainian journalists would not go. She was one of the last to report openly from the territory in Ukraine forcibly taken by Russian troops. And then she went further and entered Russia.
Ms. Roshchyna, known as Vika, was arrested her father said, and died in September, more than a year later. The circumstances of her death remain unclear, as is what she intended to do in Russia. Some have suggested she planned to travel through Russia into occupied Ukraine. She was 25.
Ukrainians have widely mourned Ms. Roshchyna’s death, for the tragic loss of a young life, but also because of the stories she wrote from parts of the country where many had been forced to flee, losing everything. Her stories had been an important lifeline for them.
Ms. Roshchyna was known as a brave, stubborn and driven journalist. Soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she joined a humanitarian convoy and tried to cross into the besieged southeastern port city of Mariupol, as almost everyone else was trying to leave. Russian forces captured her in March. They released her a week later, after beating her, she said.
Instead of fleeing, Ms. Roshchyna bought a new camera in Zaporizhzhya, a city in southern Ukraine, and hopped on a bus back into Russian-occupied territory. She appeared not to tell anyone where she was going, not even her bosses at Hromadske, the online news outlet where she worked.
When Russia invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, many Ukrainian journalists unexpectedly became combat reporters. Back then, I, too, traveled to the frontline many times. But my biggest fear was being captured by Russian troops and I never went to what become known as the “occupied territories.”
Many other journalists did, wanting to show the world what was happening in the Ukrainian cities and towns that had been taken by the Russians.
As the years went on, fewer and fewer journalists ventured into those areas. Another journalist, Inna Varenytsia, said she stopped going to the occupied parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in Ukraine after Russian forces arrested her there in 2016. She said she was released after being interrogated for a couple of hours, but that was enough for her.
Ms. Roshchyna began her career reporting from the courts in Kyiv. After the invasion, she became a combat reporter, and crossed regularly into the areas of Ukraine that were occupied by Russian forces.
I spoke to Ms. Roshchyna after she was captured and then later released by Russian security services in March 2022. She told me how officers asked her to film propaganda videos about Russian humanitarian aid. When she refused, she said, they wrapped a scarf around her head and face and started shouting at her and beating her.
“They were very angry,” she told me.
At a certain point, editors and colleagues tried to stop her from going across the frontline. But she was determined. Hromadske stopped working with her after she bought the new camera and went back into Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory without telling her bosses.
“It was too big a responsibility,” Khrystyna Kotsira, the outlet’s editor in chief, said of supporting Ms. Roshchyna’s continued efforts to cross the frontline.
Ms. Roshchyna made it out that time without being detained. She continued to go back, again and again. Editors at other publications took her stories. Many complained about the risks. But then they read the stories she delivered, like the one on the devastation left behind in Mariupol after the city was besieged by Russian forces, or the one on Ukrainian children being taken by Russian troops and sent into Russian camps.
She also wrote about the harrowing journeys of people escaping Russian occupation. On one occasion, she traveled for 10 days with a Ukrainian as they sought to escape occupied territory, passing numerous Russian checkpoints. She ultimately published a dozen stories about the experience for several of Ukraine’s largest media outlets.
“She was one of the most challenging reporters I’ve encountered,” said Yevhen Buderatsky, deputy editor of Ukrainska Pravda, a leading online news outlet in Ukraine. Still, he added, she was someone who “despite all obstacles, strove to fulfill her journalistic duties.”
Ms. Kotsira, the editor at Hromadske, said Ms. Roshchyna had explained her mission in the occupied territories in this way: “There are no Ukrainian journalists there, but there are Ukrainian citizens, so I should go.”
Russia’s wars against Ukraine have been devastating for Ukrainian journalists. Since 2022, at least 12 Ukrainian media workers have been killed while doing their work, according to the Institute of Mass Information, a Ukrainian media watchdog.
The group also said that 30 journalists are in Russian captivity, with about half of them held after the invasion of 2022.
In the summer of 2023, Ms. Varenytsia, the other journalist, tried to persuade Ms. Roshchyna to take a break from her reporting and go to the United States, where she was to receive the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation. It didn’t work.
“Vika did not see the point of leaving Ukraine,” Ms. Varenytsia said.
She did leave Ukraine that August, traveling to Poland, Latvia and then, finally, Russia. Many of the people who knew her assumed she planned to cross from Russia into occupied Ukraine. It is still not clear where exactly she was arrested.
“Vika wrote that she would soon be out of contact,” said Mr. Buderatsky, the editor at Ukrainska Pravda. He said she didn’t say directly where she was going, but “it didn’t take much to realize she was heading to the occupied territories.”
She wasn’t heard from for eight months, and then there was news that she had been arrested in Russia. On Sept. 19, she was scheduled to be transferred to a Moscow prison from a pretrial detention center in Taganrog, in southern Russia, a jail human rights activists describe as one of the country’s harshest.
Ms. Roshchyna died before she arrived at the prison and her family was only informed about her death by Russian authorities three weeks later, Ms. Kotsira, the editor, said. Three months after her death, she added, Russia has yet to return her body to the family.
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