Ukraine: Laying Viktoria to Rest

As I stood in Kyiv Mikhailivskiy cathedral last Friday, close to the closed casket containing slain journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna, it was impossible not to imagine the frail, tortured remains within.

When the 27-year-old’s body was returned by Russia earlier this year, the forensic report recorded “numerous signs of torture and ill-treatment, including abrasions and haemorrhages on various parts of the body, a broken rib, neck injuries, and possible electric shock marks on her feet”.

She was missing certain organs – an act possibly intended to mask the cause of death – and her body weighed less than 30 kilos. I could not stop thinking that my beloved French bulldog weighs 14 kg.

Viktoriia had travelled to the Russia-occupied territories of Ukraine to investigate and expose Russian war crimes - and eventually herself became the victim of one.

I did not know Viktoriia personally, although I wish I had done. We had many friends and causes in common. Once in a while I would hear stories about this uncompromising reporter who some would call "inconvenient" - too pushy, obsessed with her work and enormously demanding from herself and those who she worked with. A shift with Viktoria was quite a challenge for cameramen, I was told. She did not seem to have much of a self-preservation mechanism when it comes to difficult assignments. But isn’t that part of being a good reporter?

By dark irony, Viktoria was detained while on a mission to investigate locations of the Russian torture rooms on the occupied territories of Ukraine - places where civilians are interrogated, tortured and forced into false confessions. It was not her first detention. In 2022, while reporting from the occupied city of Berdiansk, she was captured by a Russian army soldier and turned over to the security service agents, who forced her to record a false propaganda video.

Released amid the public outrage over her illegal detention, Viktoria refused to be scared into silence. From her second captivity, Viktoria was supposed to be exchanged during a September 2024 prisoner swap in. She never made it to the exchange. Her cellmate, who had been safely returned, recounted that a prison officer told her, “It’s her own fault.”

But she was back in Kyiv now, surrounded by her grieving relatives, friends and colleagues from several newsrooms.

The priest concluded the service with a sermon about how important, and yet how inconvenient and uncompromising truth can be in war - enough for a young woman to pay an unimaginable price in the attempt to uncover it.

The procession then moved to Independence Square, a place of huge symbolism given the pro-democracy protests of 2004 and 2013, where Viktoria’s colleagues and friends could speak and share their memories and emotions.

“This should become our task as journalists from now on, to find out what exactly happened to Viktoria, how she was killed and what were the circumstances,” said Angelina Kariakina, who worked with Viktoria on the Hromadske news website. “We must reveal the names and faces of those who did it and make them notorious.”

There was a small glimmer of comfort in knowing that Ukrainian journalists remain uncompromising in their efforts to counter Russian propaganda and expose war crimes.

Viktoria’s funeral made me realise that her torturers - and those of many others - want to not only silence the truth but also terrify Ukrainians into submission with the gravity of their crimes.

But I will not allow them to win this cognitive battle, one of the many they are running alongside the conventional battlefield. Rather than imagining an awful picture of a tortured, dried-out body, I will remember Viktoriia as the strong-willed person she was, with enormous dignity and huge spirit.

Locations Ukraine

Topics Journalism, Extrajudicial killing, Conflict