RSF collects new testimonies of Victoria Roshchina’s death: “Thin, yellow, like a Holodomor victim”

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has published new eyewitness accounts of the last days of journalist Victoria Roshchina’s life in a russian prison. The testimonies confirm that she was extremely exhausted, both physically and mentally, before her death.

Four days of transfer

One of the eyewitnesses, whose name is not being disclosed for security reasons, experienced the transfer with Roshchina from Taganrog to the city of Kizel in the Perm Krai. He said that the journey took four days – first by train, then in vans – almost two thousand kilometers.

“People who met Victoria Roshchina on this journey describe her as a thin, frail woman. She was ‘yellow’, like a ‘Holodomor victim’,” RSF quotes the witness as saying.

Some prisoners shared some of their food with her. They knew her by her reputation as a journalist who had been arrested for “telling the truth.” Roshchina refused to eat.

“I don’t want to eat because they torture our boys here,” she explained her refusal.

The Last Day

When Roshchina arrived in Kizel, she could barely stand and often fainted. But the russian system continued to abuse Victoria. On September 18, 2024, the day before her death, she felt sick. According to a second eyewitness, she asked the guard for tea, promising to pay later.

In response, she heard: “Don’t say such nonsense again, you are not in the right place, you are not in the right position to ask for anything.”

The eyewitness said that a medical worker came to her cell and gave her an unknown injection. “They brought her to consciousness, they injected her with something, it seems,” says the witness. The next day, Victoria Roshchina died.

Reference Information: Victoria Roshchina was a freelance journalist who documented the reality in the occupied territories. In 2022, she wrote reports for the Ukrayinska Pravda online publication from temporarily occupied territories – about the occupied Crimea, the pseudo-referendum in the Donetsk Region, and the destroyed Mariupol.

She needed to get to the occupied territory again. Roshchina left Ukraine for Poland on July 25, 2023. She planned to reach the occupied east of Ukraine through russia in three days.

The journalist disappeared on August 3, 2023, in the russian-occupied territory from where she was reporting.

In May 2024, russia first admitted that it had detained Roshchina. The russian Ministry of Defense sent a letter of confirmation to her father, Volodymyr Roshchin.

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded Victoria Roshchina the Order of Freedom on August 2, 2025.

NUJU Information Service