The trade passed off on a lonely forest highway in February. Transferring alongside a line of refrigerated lorries, the groups in hazmat fits went about their grim work: making ready the stays of 757 Ukrainian navy casualties handed over by Russia for the journey again to Kyiv.
Clipboards in hand, intermediaries from the Crimson Cross checked their lists. For every physique shrouded in white plastic, the Russians had offered a quantity, a reputation, a location, generally a explanation for dying. After which, on the very backside of the final web page, a thriller entry: “NM SPAS 757.” The letters have been abbreviations, taken to imply “unidentified man” and “intensive injury to the coronary arteries”.
It could be weeks earlier than officers may affirm what the Guardian and its reporting companions are publishing right now. The unlabelled stays have been these of a girl. Not a soldier, both, however one of the vital high-profile civilians detained for the reason that full-scale invasion.
The journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was captured in the summertime of 2023 close to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear energy station. It was not less than her fourth reporting journey into the occupied territories. She was by this stage of the battle the one Ukrainian journalist ready to threat crossing the frontline with a view to pierce the knowledge blackout imposed by Russia.
Roshchyna died after a yr in detention, aged 27.
Data on the circumstances of her dying is proscribed. Roshchyna was held with out cost and with out entry to a lawyer. Throughout her detention, her solely recognized contact with the surface world was a four-minute cellphone name to her mother and father, a full yr after she was taken.
Preliminary forensics counsel “quite a few indicators of torture”, in keeping with the prosecutor. Burn marks on her toes from electrical shocks, abrasions on the hips and head, and a damaged rib. Her hair, which she appreciated to put on lengthy and tinted blonde on the suggestions, had been shaved.
Sources near the official investigation have additionally disclosed that the hyoid bone in her neck was damaged. It’s the sort of injury that may happen throughout strangulation. Nevertheless, the precise explanation for dying could by no means be recognized as a result of when her physique was returned in the course of the trade on 14 February, sure elements have been lacking, particularly the mind, eyes and larynx.
A battle crimes investigation has been opened with a view to prosecuting these accountable.
There have been additionally witnesses to her struggling. The Guardian, working with media companions together with Roshchyna’s writer, Ukrainska Pravda, in a collaboration led by the French newsroom Forbidden Tales, has tracked down first-hand testimonies to reconstruct the occasions that led to Roshchyna’s seize, and the small print of her therapy in detention.
This account, a part of the Viktoriia venture, is a part of an investigation into the kidnapping and systematic torture of what Ukraine believes could possibly be as many as 16,000 of its civilians, the second a part of which can be printed on Wednesday.
Most of these detained are being held with out cost. The circumstances of their detention represent a suspected battle crime, and proof is being gathered for eventual prosecutions.
The detained are assist employees, journalists, enterprise house owners, native politicians, church leaders, and anybody suspected of resisting the invasion. They’re being held at greater than 180 amenities within the occupied territories and inside Russia itself. And but, in all of the noise round peace talks, they’re not often talked about. It’s a topic Roshchyna felt was under-reported, and it was the main target of her final mission.
The details about her ultimate months has been gathered due to greater than 50 interviews with survivors of Russian captivity in addition to the households of a few of these nonetheless held. Authorized sources working inside Russia and the occupied territories have additionally shared data, as have jail officers who resigned from the service in misery over what that they had witnessed.
Whereas questions stay, one factor is for certain: Roshchyna fell sufferer to the very crimes she had got down to expose.
Recognized to her household as Vika, Roshchyna grew up within the shadow of battle. Her father was a veteran of the Soviet battle in Afghanistan, and he or she was 17 when Russia annexed Crimea. She and her sister have been raised in the identical city as Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Kryvyi Rih, the place her mother and father nonetheless reside, was 30 miles from the Russian advance into southern Ukraine in 2022.
Colleagues stated she was obsessive about work and uncompromising. “She had no life past her job, no pals, no accomplice. But additionally doing extraordinary work. For her it was a mission,” stated Sevhil Musaieva, the editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda. “She was one of many bravest journalists I met in my profession.”
To guard her sources, Roshchyna used a number of telephones. She would set her messages to vanish, and her articles have been written in recordsdata that might additionally self-delete. Roshchyna herself would vanish for weeks at a time, re-emerging to file her stories.
In March 2022, whereas reporting from the occupied metropolis of Berdiansk, she had a primary brush with hazard. Captured by a soldier and turned over to brokers of the Russian Federal Safety Service (FSB), she was coerced into recording a propaganda video and let go a number of days later, after a public outcry.
On her return residence, colleagues urged her to relaxation and search remedy. Her frame of mind was fragile and he or she was very skinny, they recalled.
However Roshchyna continued to cross the frontline. She uncovered the intimidation of employees holding the Zaporizhzhia nuclear energy station working, and investigated the capturing of two 16-year-old boys who had dared to oppose the occupation.
Musaieva stated that on Roshchyna’s final journey she was searching for the situation of black websites, basements or industrial buildings the place Russian safety operatives systematically used torture to interrogate civilians or coerce them into false confessions. She was constructing a listing of the FSB brokers accountable.
Melitopol ‘garages’
Roshchyna left Ukraine for the final time on 25 July 2023, taking a roundabout route into the occupied territories as a result of there have been no secure passages over the frontline. At 2.09pm that day, her cellphone linked to a Polish cell community. From Poland, she travelled by way of Lithuania and north into Latvia.
A photograph of her passport and her entrance type, obtained by this investigation, suggests she entered Russia from Latvia, underneath her personal title, by way of the Ludonka border crossing. The cardboard states she was heading to the town of Melitopol. She travelled 1,000 miles south by way of Russia, crossing into occupied Ukraine a number of days later.
On 3 August, just some days into her journey, her father, Volodymyr Roshchyn, raised the alarm after realising she had stopped checking in to her on-line messaging accounts.
Data he has gathered, along with the accounts of three individuals held with Roshchyna at a infamous jail within the Russian coastal city of Taganrog, simply contained in the Russian border, factors to what occurred subsequent.
One of many witnesses was her cellmate, who was launched final September and recorded her testimony on video for the prosecutor. She has requested to not be named, to guard herself and her household.
Roshchyna seems to have rented an condo in Enerhodar, the dormitory city subsequent to the Zaporizhzhia energy plant. She paid upfront for 3 nights and, leaving her backpack behind, went out to seek for black websites.
The journalist advised her cellmate she thought she had been noticed by a drone. A police automobile arrived and he or she was taken to the police station, a five-storey constructing coated in pockmarked blue tiles the place the home windows are bolstered with metallic grilles. She was held there for a number of days earlier than being moved 80 miles (130km) south to Melitopol.
The title interprets as metropolis of honey, and the world is legendary for its cherry orchards. Throughout the occupation, it performed a far darker position. “In Melitopol there’s a huge focus of FSB they usually have these momentary detention centres,” stated a European intelligence official acquainted with the scenario within the occupied territories. In a course of often known as filtration, the FSB triages captives, relying on how precious it deems them to be. Roshchyna is more likely to have been thought of a particular case, given the knowledge she was gathering.
The prosecutor believes she was taken to a black website in Melitopol often known as the “garages”, and in keeping with her cellmate’s testimony, Roshchyna later recounted how she was tortured there. Her physique was coated in bruises. “Throughout interrogations, they used electrical shocks … She bought stabbed a number of instances – I noticed them on her: arm for certain, leg too … Contemporary knife scar – forearm, delicate tissue between wrist and elbow. A scar of roughly 3cm, pierced by way of. She stated one man, she known as him a jerk … was brutal, unhinged.
“On her leg, above the heel – I noticed that too, 5cm wound. She stated: ‘I advised them to not contact my leg … I begged them to not contact that wound.’”
In the direction of the top of 2023, Roshchyna was advised by an FSB officer she named as Maxim Moroz that she could be transferred to a different jail and was promised higher therapy there. In response to witnesses, she was transported alone, by Jeep, to Taganrog. Right here, she was detained at a pre-trial detention centre often known as Sizo 2.
Refusing meals
“She arrived already pumped stuffed with unknown medicine,” stated a second detainee who encountered Roshchyna at Taganrog, who can’t be named for safety causes. “She arrived and he or she mainly began to go loopy.”
The Guardian will publish a separate, detailed account of the abuses inflicted on Ukrainians held at Taganrog. The circumstances there have been among the many worst seen at any of the various detention amenities operated by Russia.
Ukrainian intelligence has recorded 15 fatalities on the jail, based mostly on data from launched troops. Within the torture rooms, troopers and civilians have been water-boarded, crushed and shocked in an electrical chair. When exterior their cells, they have been compelled to undertake a stress place often known as the swan – bent ahead with their arms clasped behind their again at chest degree. Meals was severely rationed, with 4 and a half spoonfuls per plate, in keeping with one detainee who counted.
For Roshchyna, the impact was catastrophic. She stopped consuming. “We might discuss to her however she was misplaced in her head, eyes terrified,” recalled the primary witness, her cellmate. Roshchyna would lie “curled up foetal on the ground” behind a curtain that screened the bathroom, out of sight of the guards.
Her weight dropped to 30kg (lower than 5st). “She may rise up, however solely with me serving to as she was in such a state that she couldn’t even carry her head off the pillow. I might prop her up and he or she would seize the highest bunk to tug herself upright,” her cellmate stated.
Yevgeny Markevich, a soldier now in rehabilitation in Ukraine after a prisoner trade, stated: “She didn’t formally declare a starvation strike, she merely started to refuse meals.” . He stated he noticed her as soon as however heard her most days as she was held close to to him, in cell 115. “At first she defined it by saying that it was for non secular causes, fasting or one thing, then she started to say that she couldn’t [eat] for well being causes.”
Roshchyna’s toes and legs swelled, in keeping with her cellmate’s testimony. She was supplied coronary heart drugs however seems to have refused these. Coronary heart issues and fluid retention within the leg tissues are each indicators of hunger.
In June, she was carried out on a stretcher. She spent a number of weeks at a hospital in Taganrog the place, in keeping with witnesses, she was watched over by six masked guards armed with machine weapons. The extent of safety, and the efforts made to maintain her alive, counsel Moscow noticed her as a precious negotiating pawn. In July, she was reportedly despatched again to Taganrog with an IV drip in her arm. It appears she continued to refuse meals.
The pinnacle of the jail requested her cellmates what she appreciated to eat, and separate meals have been cooked for her. Witnesses say she was supplied bananas and sweets.
In April 2024, her household had obtained the first official affirmation that Roshchyna was alive, in a letter from the Russian defence ministry. It said solely that she “has been detained and is presently within the territory of the Russian Federation”.
Colleagues started pulling strings. A message was despatched to the Vatican, the place Pope Francis, who had been capable of talk with Russia by way of backchannels, agreed to ask for her title to be added to the prisoner trade listing.
Phrase finally reached her editor that she was to be launched. In the direction of the top of August, Roshchyna was allowed to cellphone residence. Her mother and father have been advised by the Ukrainian negotiators she was on starvation strike. They saved their mobiles switched on all day, ready for her name. When she lastly got here on the road, Roshchyna was talking in Russian. “I used to be promised that I might be residence in September,” she advised them. Her father urged her to eat. Then she stated her farewells. “Nicely, that’s it. Bye, bye. Mother, Dad, I really like you.”
‘Not within the databases’
On 13 September, bathed in autumn sunshine, 49 prisoners of battle stepped off a coach from Russia on to Ukrainian soil. A welcome celebration met them with flags and bouquets of yellow sunflowers wrapped in blue tissue paper. Roshchyna’s cellmate was there, together with not less than two different males held at Taganrog. However the journalist was lacking.
Precisely why has by no means been made clear. On 8 September, Roshchyna was taken from her cell, prepared for the lengthy journey again to Ukraine. The nameless Taganrog detainee was one of many final to see her alive.
“We requested a lady from the cell to assist her go down. Along with her assist, she went down once they have been presupposed to trade her. After that, a safety officer got here and stated that the journalist by no means made it to the trade. The officer added: ‘It’s her personal fault.’”
Some weeks later, the deputy head of Russia’s navy police wrote to Roshchyna’s father to say she had died on 19 September.
When Roshchyna’s physique was finally returned, it was in such unhealthy situation that visible identification was tough. Nevertheless, connected to her leg, examiners discovered a tag with the handwritten inscription “V.V. Roshchyna”, and the DNA check was a match together with her mother and father.
Her father, in his grief, refuses to just accept she is gone. He has requested extra examinations. And he has continued to write down letters, together with to Taganrog, demanding data. The Sizo director, Aleksandr Shtoda, has replied twice claiming Roshchyna was by no means there. His most up-to-date response, in January, said she “is just not and was not listed within the databases”.
In November 2022, Roshchyna described what motivated her. She had been given an award for braveness by the Worldwide Ladies’s Media Basis, however she didn’t wish to cease work to attend the ceremony in Los Angeles and so she despatched a message, hailing her colleagues.
“We have now remained devoted to our mission, to convey the reality to the world, countering Russian propaganda,” she stated. “Sadly, many journalists have died. I wish to dedicate this award to them. In spite of everything, they died within the struggle for the reality, attempting to file Russian crimes. I thank them.”
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