Memory of Victoria Roshchina

The former journalist Hromadske, 27-year-old Victoria Roshchina, died in Russian captivity. The invaders claim that this happened during the transfer from Taganrog to Moscow

Vika Roshchina has been working in HromadSke for more than five years. She was one of those journalists who are not waiting for the editorial assignment. Only something happened, Vika was already there. At rallies, clashes, places of murders. She took up difficult challenges, loved law enforcement, attended scandalous and important court hearings. Time and geography were unimportant for her - at any moment Victoria was ready to go on a business trip even before she was told that she needed to go. She had no weekend, vacations, sick leave.

From 2017 to 2022, Vika spent dozens of streams-from under government buildings and courtrooms, on the air, she met from the captivity of the National Guard Vitaly Markiva , political prisoners Oleg Sentsov and Alexander Kolchenko , shot films and wrote articles on various topics.

February 23, 2022 Victoria was in the happiness of the Luhansk region. She went there on the eve of a full-scale invasion, because she understood that something would happen, so she went closer to the front line.

With the outbreak of full -scale war, Vika shot videos and wrote articles from hot spots in the east and south of Ukraine. In the first two weeks, she managed to make a report from Gulyaipol , which was then under constant shelling, and from Zaporozhye, to which the Russians were approaching ; Talk to the evacuated residents of the Volnovakha and tell the world how the temporarily occupied Energodar lives .

Then Vika was preparing materials about hostilities in the Zaporizhzhya and Donetsk regions and planned to go to Mariupol to talk about what was happening in the city, which was already in the ring.

On March 16, we learned that on the way to Mariupol, the Russians detained it and sent it to the colony of temporarily occupied Berdyansk. March 21 was released. About this experience, Vika wrote the column “A week in captivity with the invaders. How I got out of the hands of the FSB, "Kadyrovites" and Dagestanis. " Immediately after the release, Vika nevertheless made material about Mariupol, talking with the evacuated residents, who at that time were in Berdyansk.

Subsequently, she began to work on freelance for different editions in order to have more freedom in where she was going and what she writes about. I stopped at the occupied territories and wrote reports from there.

On August 3, 2023, it became known that Vika disappeared in the temporarily occupied territories. Only in May 2024, Russia first confirmed that she was holding her in captivity.

And on October 10 it became known about her death. Pyotr Yatsenko, a press secretary of the Coordinating headquarters on the treatment of prisoners of war, said that Victoria was preparing to exchange, but, "unfortunately, we did not have time": "The fact that she was transferred from Taganrog to Moscow was the stage of its preparation for release."

We were really waiting for the day of the liberation of Vicki. But neither Stream nor a happy story will be returned.

However, hundreds of her materials remain. They were of great importance for her. Were her life and part of her herself.

Shortly before the start of a full -scale war, in January 2022, Vika introduced a film about teenage colonies.

She investigated in it how staying in such institutions affects young children. She talked with convicted adolescents, those who are just waiting for the sentence, and committed a second crime, as well as with colonies, volunteers and psychologists.

In addition, Vika worked on materials about a guy who was sentenced to six years for the sale of several grams of cannabis, and a teenager who was accused of attacking his relatives with a knife.

In 2021, Vika made a film on how to psychologically return the military from the war, what (and is it enough) does the state for this. In the film, she told the stories of Alexei Belko, who “mined” the metropolitan bridge, Dmitry Balabukh, who stabbed a man at a stop, Nikolai Mikitenko, who burned himself on Independence Square in Kyiv. Vika tried to answer the question why the military returned from the war physically, but they cannot do this psychologically. Why war is still in them.

Vika was the first journalist who dealt with the history of the boarding school in the Nikolaev region, where in 2021 one of the minor pupils was allegedly forced to have an abortion. Then law enforcement officers opened a criminal case, the girl was sent for rehabilitation, and politicians and representatives of the children's Ombudsman took the situation under personal control.

However, the story did not end there. For many graduates and former boarding school workers, she began to openly talk about painful.

Most graduates in a conversation with Vika compared this place with the prison: few people know what is happening behind closed doors, so even the relevant authorities are difficult to control this.

In the film "Kerch captives" Victoria spoke about 24 Ukrainian sailors, who were captured by Russians near the Kerch Strait on November 25, 2018. They were kept in Russian prisons for months, not recognizing prisoners of war, despite the obligations of the International Tribunal under the sea to immediately release the military. Vika followed their affairs, talked with relatives of the sailors, was in Russian ships, spoke with lawyers, military and prisoners of war and created a reconstruction of events in the strait. We presented the film in August 2019, and on September 7, Vika met sailors in Borispol - they were then released as part of a great exchange.

In the spring of 2018, the fire destroyed more than 600 hectares of the Aleshkovsky forest of the Kherson region. Then, the mayor of the mayor of Kherson, Ekaterina Gandzyuk, emphasized: the forest is a tourniquet in order to then sell. In July 2018, they attacked Katya, and in November she died of injuries. The prosecutor’s office then said that the words of the activist about the arson of the forest were a probable reason for the commission of a crime against her.

All the time since the attack on Catherine Vika Roshchin, she monitored the development of this case, spoke with her father of the deceased and attended almost every court hearing.

From the beginning to completion of work on Hromadske, Vika did not leave the topic of executions on the Maidan. She made materials about the “black company” “Golden Eagle” , the abduction and torture of the Maidanites Igor Lutsenko and Yuri Verbitsky, as well as the key sentences for the Maidan’s affairs.

All materials of Victoria Roshchina are available on the link .