Detained, blindfolded and threatened with death: a week in the hands of Ukraine’s Russian occupiers
Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna was on her way to Mariupol when she was taken hostage. She recounts her ordeal here
Index pays tribute to Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna who has died in Russian detention
The Ukrainian government has confirmed the death of journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who died during a prisoner swap in September. Free expression organisations, including Index on Censorship, are calling on Russia to disclose the circumstances in which the 27-year-old died.
According to Russian news outlet Mediazona, she died whilst being transferred from a prison in Taganrog, a city in the southwest of Russia near the Ukrainian border, to Moscow.
Petro Yatsenko, a Ukrainian government spokesperson for prisoner of war coordination, and Yaroslav Yurchyshyn, head of the Ukrainian parliament’s committee on freedom of speech, yesterday confirmed Roshchyna’s death. Her father has been notified of her death by the Russian authorities, according to Yurchyshyn.
Roshchyna wrote from the front line for several Ukrainian media outlets before she was seized by Russian forces in August 2023 whilst travelling to east Ukraine for a report. Her capture was confirmed by Russia in April 2024.
This was not the first time Roshchyna had been taken by the Russian forces in eastern Ukraine. In April 2022, Index published a powerful piece about her experience of being arrested while travelling from Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol. It is an exemplary piece of level-headed reporting. But it contains some chilling detail, including the moment when a member of the FSB, the Russian secret service, tells her: “If we bury you somewhere here, no one will ever find out. You will be lost forever.”
Index on Censorship will ensure that the memory of Victoria Roshchyna will never be lost.
Jemimah Steinfeld, chief executive of Index on Censorship, said: “The death in custody of any journalist is always gut-wrenching but especially so when it is one we have published. Victoria Roshchyna was a talented young journalist with her life ahead of her. We are proud to count her as an Index writer.
“Her death is a great loss, one that has shaken the Index team. It is also a stark reminder of the threat that Putin’s regime poses to freedoms more generally and to media freedom specifically, which has only increased several years into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
“We call for an immediate and thorough investigation into the cause of her death and for those responsible to be held accountable. And our thoughts go out to her family, friends and colleagues at this challenging time. May her memory be a blessing.”
Russia, disinformation and two Olympic boxers
Boxer Imane Khelif broke down in tears last week following her victory over Hungary’s Luca Anna Hamori in the welterweight quarter final at the 2024 Paris Olympics guaranteed her a medal. It was an emotional moment for the Algerian not just in terms of her sporting achievement but because she had spent the past week embroiled in a misinformation storm.
Khelif – who is now guaranteed at least a silver medal after her victory over Thailand’s Janjaem Suwannapheng – was labelled as transgender in several viral social media posts, an inaccuracy which was then parroted by some news organisations and politicians. Khelif is neither transgender nor identifies as intersex.
Much of the recent viral outrage at Khelif’s Olympic success stemmed from a claim by the Russian-led International Boxing Association in 2023 that she and fellow boxer Lin Yu-ting of Taiwan had failed certain gender tests. These tests have never been published and are, as of today, unverified. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) revoked the IBA ruling, stating the decision was “arbitrary”, “sudden” and “taken without any proper procedure”.
The disqualification resulting from the IBA tests also apparently came after Khelif beat a Russian prospect at an IBA event.
There have been mixed reports over the content of the apparently secret gender testing, with IBA president Umar Kremlev claiming in a chaotic press conference that the pair had high levels of testosterone while the organisation’s chief executive alleged these were actually chromosome tests. Even beyond the lack of cohesion and clarity, the issue with sex testing itself is that every version invites criticism when scrutinised because most sports are organised according to a strict male-female binary, while nature does not follow such a binary – sex is more complex than that.
The IBA does not oversee Olympic boxing. Their credibility was seriously damaged in recent years following longstanding accusations of a lack of transparency and poor governance. They were finally suspended as boxing’s governing body and stripped of involvement in the Olympic games. Neither the IOC nor World Boxing endorse the ruling made by the IBA.
The IBA has close links to Vladimir Putin and Russia, a country which has been involved in massive misinformation campaigns around the Olympic games because their athletes were not allowed to compete under the Russian flag.
According to AP, Russian bots have been responsible for amplifying the Khelif controversy. The story was soon picked up by voices with huge followings, including billionaire X owner Elon Musk. It travelled beyond social media, with several news organisations and politicians wrongfully asserting that Khelif is transgender. US-based newspaper The Boston Globe were forced to issue an apology for labelling Khelif as transgender in one of their headlines. Fox News also labelled her as a transgender boxer live on air, while host Ainsley Earhardt wrongly described her as someone who identifies as a trans woman. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump repeated these false claims.
The dangers of misinformation have been well-documented in the age of social media but are as relevant as ever in sewing division. Fake news spreading on social media sites is currently fuelling a number of political agendas and was cited as one of the catalysts for the far-right Islamophobic and anti-immigration riots in the UK.
BBC disinformation correspondent Marianna Spring, who deals with such viral mistruths on a daily basis, told Index in February that the unregulated spread of misinformation can cause real-world harm, so it’s crucial in a free society to call it out.
“If you are being repeatedly hounded or abused online, your freedom of expression is compromised,” she explained. “What I’m doing is exposing the harm these extremist truths can cause rather than policing what people can say.”
Khelif herself has been subjected to hate and abuse on a huge scale, as has Yu-ting, who is also competing at the games and is guaranteed a medal. IOC president Thomas Bach condemned the narrative surrounding the two athletes, calling it “politically motivated”.
“All this hate speech, with this aggression and abuse, and fuelled by this agenda, is totally unacceptable,” he said during a news briefing.
Even more worryingly, these allegations could have had serious consequences when you consider that in Algeria – Khelif’s home country – being transgender is illegal.
There are legitimate questions in a free society to be raised around gender in sport and the IOC’s Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-discrimination on the basis of gender identity and sex variations was criticised by some international sports medicine bodies in 2022. No one should be silenced for asking these questions or having the conversation.
But the heat around Khelif has not been about asking questions. Instead the issue here is one of jumping to conclusions. What could have been a heartwarming story of a woman finding sporting success against all odds became a cautionary tale of the dangers of misinformation and the speed at which unchecked information or false claims can be spread on social media platforms, endangering people’s lives and distorting reality. Who wins the gold medal here? Russia.
Vladimir Kara-Murza: The dissident spirit of Russia
There is a tendency to see Russia as a huge monolithic entity with a matching ideology. This is the expansionist, imperial Russia that poisons its enemies and kidnaps their children. It is the Russia of the gulags, of Putin, Stalin and the Tsars. But there is another Russia. It is the Russia of the eight brave students who stood in Red Square in 1968 to demonstrate against the invasion of Czechoslovakia and inspired the founders of this magazine. It the Russia of the dissidents of the 1970s and the reformers of the 1990s. It is the Russia of Pussy Riot, of Alexander Livintenko, Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny.
This is the Russia of Vladmir Kara-Murza, the Russian activist, politician, journalist and historian released this week in a prisoner swap with Russian spies held in the West.
Much has been made of the detention and release of American journalist Evan Gershkovich – and rightly so. The Wall Street Journal reporter has become an important symbol of the fundamental values of a free media. It is to his eternal credit that his final request before release was an interview with Vladimir Putin. We also welcome the release of Alsu Kurmasheva, a Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist from the Tatar/Bashkir service.
But it is Vladimir Kara-Murza who most fully represents the dissident spirit of Russia that runs counter to the authoritarian tendency that has dominated the country for so much of its recent history.
He is often described simply as one of the fiercest opponents of Putin, But Kara-Murza is so much more than that. He is above all the keeper of the flame of the Russian dissident tradition. He, more than anyone, understands the power of this alternative version of Russian identity.
Supporters of Index interested in the subject should watch the four-part documentary series, They Chose Freedom, directed and presented by Kara-Murza in 2005. The film is edited by his wife Evgenia, who has led the campaign for his release. Two decades later it is still acts as a powerful reminder of the courage of those who spoke out against the Soviet system. It examines the roots of the dissident movement in the weekly poetry readings held in Mayakovsky Square in the 1950s. It includes interviews with the key players in the movement, including Vladminir Bukovsky, Anatoly Sharnsky and three of the participants of the Red Square demonstration of 1968, Pavel Litvinov, Natalya Gorbanevskaya and and Viktor Fainberg.
In April 2023, shortly before he was sentenced to 25 years for charges linked to his opposition to the war in Ukraine, Kara-Murza said: “I know the that the day will come when the darkness engulfing our country will clear. Our society will open its eyes and shudder when it realises what crimes were committed in its name.”.
The release comes after reports earlier this year that Kara-Murza had been transferred to a harsher prison regime and that his health was deteriorating. An image shared on Telegram (see above) by fellow dissident Ilya Yashin, also released in the prisoner swap, show Kara-Murza this morning in Germany where they will hold a press conference later today. We await news that he and family will finally be able to welcome him back to Britain, which they have made their home.