Laurent Richard details Viktoriia Roshchyna death in Russian captivity

Viktoriia Roshchyna vanished in the summer of 2023 while reporting from Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine. According to The Guardian, her body was returned to Ukraine in February 2025 as one of 757 casualties handed over by Russian authorities in an exchange, after months in which even her fate was uncertain.

Laurent Richard writes that Roshchyna was one of the few Ukrainian reporters willing to enter occupied territory to investigate a system of abductions and secret detention. That choice collided with a closed information environment built to make verification expensive and personal risk routine: checkpoints, controlled movement, and a prison bureaucracy that can hold civilians outside public view. The deputy head of Russia’s military police later informed her father that she died on 19 September 2023, but Richard describes a return that raised more questions than it answered. Ukrainian prosecutors cited preliminary forensic indications of torture, and the examination found key organs missing—her eyeballs, brain and larynx—details that, if accurate, point to a system that treats the body itself as evidence to be managed.

Richard’s account is also a description of how modern investigative reporting is being reorganised around that kind of state power. His organisation, Forbidden Stories, did not try to replace a missing reporter with a single heroic substitute; it assembled a consortium. Ukrainian journalists from Ukrainska Pravda, Russian reporters in exile from iStories, and partners including the Guardian and the Washington Post pooled testimony, open-source data and satellite imagery. Former detainees who said they had shared cells with Roshchyna became primary witnesses, while visual investigators reconstructed parts of Taganrog prison—described as a “Russian Guantánamo”—in 3D to map how detainees moved through a wider network of sites.

The practical bet behind that model is that repression scales by isolating people. A lone reporter can be disappeared; a cross-border team can keep asking, comparing notes, and publishing even when access is denied. Collaboration also forces internal friction: competing editorial cultures, languages and standards slow the work down, but they also create more chances to catch errors before a government’s denials become the only “confirmed” version. The result, Richard argues, is not just a story about one journalist’s death but a partial inventory of a detention system designed to stay uninspected.

The commemoration for Roshchyna in Kyiv took place on 11 October 2024, while she was still missing. Her investigation continued without her, and her body came back months later with pieces removed.