Ukraine: “The Gravest Attack on Freedom of Speech”
As Russia targets media workers in Ukraine, their fellow journalists fight back for justice.
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“I heard screams, heard others being interrogated. They were simply tortured.”
Ukraine: “The Gravest Attack on Freedom of Speech”
As Russia targets media workers in Ukraine, their fellow journalists fight back for justice.
“It was a targeted FPV drone strike. I’m alive. They amputated my leg. My closest friend, brother and mentor, Antoni Lallican, is dead,” Ukrainian photographer Heorhii Ivanchenko wrote on Facebook on October 8.
Five days earlier, the freelance photojournalists had been documenting the construction of fortifications in the Donetsk region, near the village of Komyshevakha some 20 kilometres from the front line, when they were hit by a drone.
Olha Kovaliova, a colleague and friend of Ivanchenko who heads the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers, has no doubt that the Russian military knew they were attacking media workers.
“The men had cameras and were wearing body armour with identifying markings, so it would have been difficult not to realise they were journalists,” she told IWPR. “According to Heorhii, the drone deliberately targeted them while they were in an open area.”
Lallican was killed instantly, while Ivanchenko was evacuated to a hospital in Kramatorsk and later to the Mechnykov Hospital in Dnipro where doctors amputated his left leg. He has since been moved to Kharkiv where he is undergoing both physical and psychological rehabilitation.
In September and October 2025 alone, the Institute of Mass Information NGO documented ten strikes by Russia against journalists, resulting in the deaths of five media professionals.
Human rights defenders consider these attacks to be part of a systematic Russian campaign targeting media workers, and numerous war crimes investigations are ongoing into multiple cases.
Mariana Haiovska-Kovbasiuk, head of information policy and communications at the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, said that Ukrainian law enforcement had recorded the deaths of 66 journalists since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
“The dead include 57 Ukrainian and nine international journalists, from the US, Lithuania, the UK, France and Russia. An additional 48 journalists have been wounded,” she said.
Ukrainian investigators have named 17 individuals as suspects in war crimes committed against journalists. Cases against 11 of them have been sent to court and three have already resulted in convictions, Haiovska-Kovbasiuk noted.
The Institute of Mass Information (IMI) NGO maintains its own tally of attacks against journalists, including not only media workers killed in the line of duty but also those who were mobilised into the Ukrainian defence forces. IMI director Oksana Romaniuk said that, according to their data, 122 journalists have been killed since Russia’s invasion began in 2014, with 116 since the start of the full-scale war.
IMI also documents the cases of journalists whom Russia is holding as civilian hostages. According to their records, at least 26 Ukrainian media professionals, plus one journalist who enlisted in the army, were held in Russian captivity as of August 24, 2025.
Perhaps the best-known case is that of journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, who died while in Russian custody. The journalist had been captured twice, first in March 2022, when she was detained for ten days in occupied Berdiansk and then released. Roshchyna returned to the occupied territories in the summer of 2023, planning to report on illegal civilian detention centres. She disappeared in August 2023 and for nine months her whereabouts were unknown until Russian security forces finally admitted to holding her.
Roshchyna was expected to be part of a prisoner exchange in September 2024, but a month later, the Russian Ministry of Defence notified her father that she had died. It took another four months for Russia to return Roshchyna’s body. The condition of the body made it impossible to determine the cause of death, but a post mortem revealed multiple injuries including bone fractures and head trauma.
The journalist was buried in Kyiv on August 8.
Investigative Research
A feature of such attacks on media workers is that their colleagues are often involved in investigating the circumstances of the crime. Romaniuk noted that investigative journalists frequently provide their findings to law enforcement authorities, who then add the evidence to the criminal file.
In Roshchyna’s case, journalists from Slidstvo.Info established that before her death, she was transferred 2,500 kilometres from Taganrog to the town of Kizel in Russia’s Perm Krai. She arrived there on September 11, 2023 and died eight days later.
Ukrainian soldiers who were held by Russian forces in Kizel said that during the intake process, guards brutally beat prisoners and tortured them with electric shocks. The warden of the Taganrog facility is currently the sole suspect in the journalist’s death, but Slidstvo.Info has published a list of senior figures from the Pre-trial Detention Centre No 3 in Kizel who may also be implicated.
Pauline Maufrais, the regional representative of Reporters Without Borders in Ukraine, said she saw a real willingness from investigators to probe crimes against journalists. She also noted international collaboration and support for such endeavours. In Roshchyna’s case, for instance, Ukrainian investigators have asked French specialists to conduct further forensic analysis.
France’s National Anti-Terrorist Prosecutor’s Office is also investigating photojournalist Lallican’s murder, with investigators from both countries having classified the incident as a war crime.
Maufrais stressed that this exchange of information was “vital for the investigation and it’s also crucial to demonstrate a genuine commitment to combating impunity”.
Attacks on journalists have also included foreign outfits. On October 28, a film crew from the German Welt publication came under attack from a Russian drone strike in eastern Ukraine while filming a Ukrainian air defence unit. According to the publication’s correspondent Ibrahim Naber, he and cameraman Viktor Lysenko sustained minor injuries, while their producer Ivan Zakharchenko required surgery. The attack also killed one Ukrainian soldier and severely wounded another.
Other recent incidents include an October 23 Russian drone strike on a vehicle carrying a crew from the FreeDom television channel in Kramatorsk, Donetsk region. Journalist Olena Hubanova, who worked under the pseudonym Aliona Hramova, and cameraman Yevhen Karmazin were killed, while their colleague Oleksandr Kolychev was seriously injured.
Ukrainian investigators have launched criminal investigations into the murders of Hubanova and Karmazin.
Accountability for attacks on journalists thus far have included the March 2024 conviction and sentencing in absentia of Valentyn Motuzenko, a so-called advisor to the head of the de facto Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), and Volodymyr Lieontiev, the former head of the Russian occupation administration in Nova Kakhovka. They were handed 12 years in prison for abducting and torturing Kherson journalist Oleh Baturin in March 2022. The convicted men ordered the kidnapping of Tavriisk Mayor Mykola Rizak and Nova Kakhovka City Council Secretary Dmytro Vasyliev. All three captives were eventually released. Vasyliev has since died.
During the trial, Baturin – also an IWPR contributor - testified about the torture. He recounted how Lieontiev threatened to scalp him and told him to “say goodbye to his life”. The journalist was denied food and water, interrogated and beaten for hours, then handcuffed to a radiator for three days.
Romaniuk emphasised that Russia’s campaign against Ukrainian media went far beyond attacks on individuals to the targeting of essential infrastructure.
The IMI has formally documented over 20 attacks on TV towers, although Romaniuk said that the actual number was “significantly higher”. She stressed that TV towers were civilian infrastructure that could not be considered legitimate military targets.
Additionally, occupying forces are destroying Ukrainian newsrooms. In 2014 alone, the IMI recorded over 50 incidents in which assailants threw Molotov cocktails into buildings or bombed media offices. In total, Russian forces have destroyed more than 1,000 Ukrainian media outlets since 2014, the IMI director stated.
Russian authorities are also attempting to completely block residents in the occupied territories from accessing independent media, explained Romaniuk. In some occupied areas, even mobile service is unavailable, she said, concluding, “This is arguably the gravest attack on freedom of speech and the media sector in Europe since the Second World War.”
