“Torture is a real threat to journalists in the occupied territories,” Sergiy Tomilenko in an interview for IPI

Ukrainian media workers are obvious military targets for the russian occupiers, and there is currently no way to provide legal aid or other support to journalists in the occupied territories, Sergiy Tomilenko, the President of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine (NUJU), said in an interview for the International Press Institute (IPI).

As an example, he referred to journalists from the Kherson Region, Oleh Baturin and Serhii Tsyhipa.

“Journalists detained in the occupied territories are threatened with torture and extrajudicial killings,” the President of the Union emphasized. “The russian occupation forces keep them in inhumane conditions. There are no protection mechanisms for these people. Some form of relative protection or contact with them appears only after they are sent to serve their sentences in a colony in the occupied Crimea or russia,” Sergiy Tomilenko said.

At the same time, IPI Deputy Director Scott Griffen said that the IPI is deeply concerned about the growing number of reports of the disappearance or detention of Ukrainian journalists in the occupied territories.

“The russian occupation authorities, whose actions are not controlled by any significant institution, can more easily resort to torture and other extrajudicial actions against arrested journalists, about whom the world community receives little information. The world community must immediately intervene in this situation, forcing the russian authorities to provide transparency and release all Ukrainian journalists they are holding hostage,” added Scott Griffen.

The IPI global network calls on the world community to make more efforts to find and release Ukrainian journalists who have gone missing or have been detained under unclear circumstances while covering events in russian-occupied territories. According to IPI monitoring data, such cases have increased in recent months.

According to the NUJU, on October 30, the russian occupation authorities announced the detention of Heorhii Levchenko, the administrator of the popular Telegram channel RIA Melitopol, who published news about events in Melitopol, a city in southern Ukraine that has been under russian occupation since March 2022. Levchenko and several other residents of Melitopol are accused of calling for terrorism, reports the NUJU.

According to the NUJU, the russian occupation forces considered the Telegram channel as “hostile media” and detained Levchenko and other persons, whose names remain unknown.

At the end of August, the Ukrainian mass media already reported that Levchenko‘s telegram channel was hacked by the russian invaders. However, for the next two months, there was no information about the whereabouts of the journalist and the charges brought against him.

The situation that the administrator of RIA Melitopol got into is similar to the situation with the retired Ukrainian journalist Iryna Levchenko, who was detained in the same city in May this year together with her husband. After the arrest of the couple, the russian authorities did not officially announce the charges against them for several months, and relatives only reported suspicions that the Levchenkos were arrested on charges of extremism.

At the beginning of October, the Ukrainian media also reported the disappearance of journalist Viktoriya Roshchyna, a freelancer for the leading Kyiv publication “Ukrainian Pravda.” At the end of July, Roshchyna left for the occupied territory of Southern Ukraine and has since been considered missing. Russian authorities have not released information about her possible arrest, and her current whereabouts are unknown.

Another journalist, Dmytro Khyliuk, has been missing since March 2022 after being captured by russian forces in northern Ukraine. Only a few months later, Khyliuk‘s relatives received a short message from him in which the journalist confirmed that he was alive. Ukrainian human rights groups were also able to confirm that he was under arrest in a prison in russia near the Ukrainian border before being transferred to a facility east of Moscow.