While there are happily no new reports of arrests this week, I’m sorry to say there is one devastating story of a Ukrainian journalist who died while in Russian captivity.

Included in a recent exchange of bodies of victims on both sides of the Russia-Ukraine war were the remains of a young Ukrainian journalist, Viktoria Roshchyna, who had gone missing in August of 2023 during a reporting trip and had been held incommunicado for months. She is said to have died in or around September 2024, though her family were not notified by Russian authorities for another month.

When her body was finally returned to Ukraine in February of this year, forensic examination showed “numerous signs of torture and ill-treatment … including abrasions and hemorrhages on various parts of the body, a broken rib and possible traces of electric shock.” [Ivana Kottasova, Victoria Butenko and Daria Tarasova-Markina, CNN, April 30, 2025.]

Yuriy Belousov, head of the war crimes department of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office, said that the injuries were inflicted while Roshchyna was still alive. [Id.]

He added that her body had arrived labeled as “an unidentified male,” and it was only through repeated DNA analyses that her true identity was able to be determined. According to her colleagues at Ukrainska Pravda, she was returned with missing organs, including her brain, eyeballs, and parts of her trachea (windpipe), in an apparent attempt to disguise the cause of death. [Id.]

A colleague, journalist Evgeniya Motorevskaya, said about Viktoria:

“For her, there was nothing more important than journalism. Viktoria was always where the most important events for the country took place. And she would have continued to do this for many years, but the Russians killed her.” [Id.]

A young life, full of promise, snuffed out in the most horrendous way by the brutal regime of a man who cares nothing for humanity . . . but only for his own political gains.

Viktoria never made it onto our hostage list because we didn’t know about her until it was too late. Tragically, she is far from the only victim of Vladimir Putin’s mad killing spree.

*. *. *

And in continuing support of those hostages still confined to Russian prisons and penal colonies, we remember them once again:

The Azov 12
David Barnes
Ales Bialiatski (in Belarus)
Gordon Black
Andrei Chapiuk (in Belarus)
Antonina Favorskaya
Konstantin Gabov
Robert Gilman
Stephen James Hubbard
Sergey Karelin
Ihar Karney (in Belarus)
Vadim Kobzev
Darya Kozyreva
Artyom Kriger
Uladzimir Labkovich (in Belarus)
Michael Travis Leake
Aleksei Liptser
Ihar Losik (in Belarus)
Daniel Martindale
Farid Mehralizada (in Azerbaijan)
Nika Novak
Marfa Rabkova (in Belarus)
Igor Sergunin
Dmitry Shatresov
Robert Shonov
Eugene Spector
Valiantsin Stafanovic (in Belarus)
Siarhei Tsikhanouski (in Belarus)
Laurent Vinatier
Robert Romanov Woodland
Vladislav Yesypenko (in Crimea)
Yuras Zyankovich (in Belarus)

. . . and any others I may have missed.

Safe home, everyone . . . and soon.

Just sayin’ . . .

Brendochka
5/4/25