Ghost Detainees. The Story of Viktoriia Roshchyna

“Dad, Mom, I love you! Get ready to meet me. I was promised that I would be home in September,” Volodymyr Roshchyn recalls the last words he heard from his daughter. By that time, the only thing the family knew about the fate of Viktoriia, who had disappeared a year earlier, was that she had been detained and was in Russia.

This phone call was the result of “high-level” negotiations between the Russian and Ukrainian sides, said the family’s lawyer, Yevgenia Kopalkina. A representative of the Ukrainian Coordination Headquarters for the Treatment of Prisoners of War informed the journalist’s father about the upcoming call in August 2024.

“My wife and I were asked to persuade her to end her hunger strike. We didn’t know when they would call. We didn’t leave our phones for a minute, we were waiting,” Volodymyr Roshchyn describes how he felt. A week later, the family was finally able to talk to Viktoriia. The conversation was short.

— I asked, “How are you? Where are you?” She didn’t answer directly, just said she missed us and sent regards to the family. Her voice sounded cheerful.

Viktoriia’s father recalls that his daughter promised to start eating again: “Vika is the kind of person — if she promises, she’ll do it.”

On the eve, September 13, 2024, Roshchyn was told that his daughter would return home during the next exchange. During the 56th exchange between Ukraine and Russia, 49 Ukrainians returned from Russian captivity. Viktoriia Roshchyna was not among them.

Ukrainian civilian prisoners in Russia are called “ghosts” — their whereabouts are unknown, whether they are dead or alive. Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna wanted to investigate the disappearance of people in the occupied territories, but she herself was captured by Russia. A year later, her family received a message about Viktoriia’s death.

IStories, together with top world media, led by the French journalistic project Forbidden Stories, conducted their own investigation into the journalist’s death and completed her work on how the system of abduction of Ukrainian civilians works.

Exchange of prisoners

Many were waiting for and pushing for Viktoriia’s exchange: her parents, colleagues, and journalists from different countries. Sevgil Musayeva, editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda, recalls that in September, a foreign colleague told her that, according to his information, Roshchyna would be returned during the next exchange.

— The exchange took place, but Vika didn’t appear. It was terrible. I had a feeling that something had happened to her. I was very worried. I had already called her father and told him that Vika was being returned. My colleague said that something strange had happened because he knew for sure that she was on the list. He suggested that someone had crossed her off.

At the end of September, Sevgil Musayeva again received promises from her sources that Viktoriia would soon be exchanged: “We believed in it. And on October 10, her father called me and said that he had received a letter.”

The letter from the Russian Ministry of Defense is dated October 2nd, signed by the Deputy Head of the Main Directorate of Military Police of the Ministry of Defense, Major General Vitaly Koch, and contains only three sentences.

“The appeal received by the Ministry of Defense of Russia has been considered. Roshchyna Viktoriia Volodymyrovna, born 06.10.1996, died on 19.09.2024. The body of Roshchyna V.V. will be transferred to the Ukrainian side as part of the exchange of bodies of detained persons.”

“I read ‘exchange of bodies.’ I thought — have they really started calling prisoners ‘bodies’? I read it again, a second time, a third… What they wrote that she died, I don't see it. Only on the fourth read I finally see it. That’s when it hit me. We had just been talking, already getting ready to welcome her home — and then this,” recalls Volodymyr Roshchyn.

The letter contained neither a death certificate nor any other documents confirming the death and explaining its cause. Volodymyr Roshchyn continued to write appeals to Russian authorities, trying to find out what happened to his daughter. None of the letters received a substantive response.

Exchange of bodies

In February 2025, during another exchange, the Ukrainian side received the bodies of 757 servicemen, which were distributed to various morgues across the country. The morgue in the city of Vinnytsia received a body bag labeled “NM SPAS 757.” “NM” stood for “unidentified male,” “SPAS” indicated “extensive damage to the coronary arteries,” and “757” was the body number. When the bag was opened, it contained the body of a woman “in a state of deep freezing and showing signs of cachexia” (extreme exhaustion). There was a tag on her shin — “7390 Roshchyna V. V.”

“Numerous signs of torture and ill-treatment were found on the victim’s body, including abrasions and hemorrhages on various parts of the body, a broken rib, neck injuries, and possible electric shock marks on the feet. However, due to the condition of the body, experts have not yet been able to establish the cause of death." Yuriy Belousov, the head of the War Crimes Unit at the Ukrainian Prosecutor General’s Office, described the results of the forensic medical examination to us.

The body was missing some organs: the eyeballs, the brain, part of the larynx, and the hyoid bone was broken, said a source close to the investigation into Viktoriia Roshchyna’s death. It was launched by the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine in March 2025.

A forensic expert, who requested anonymity, suggested in a conversation with journalists that the removal of specific organs could be an attempt to conceal strangulation: “Removing the larynx during an autopsy is not standard practice. The larynx can be good evidence of strangulation. When a person is strangled, the hyoid bone is most often broken. In cases of strangulation, bleeding can be found in the whites of the eyes, and a lack of oxygen in the brain.”

Sometimes Russia returns the bodies of Ukrainian citizens without internal organs, a source in Ukrainian law enforcement told the project’s authors: “In Russia, they explain this by the protocol for handling the bodies of the deceased when sending them for autopsy. However, this could be a way to hide traces of violence.”

The initial DNA test showed a 99.999% match between the body and Viktoriia Roshchyna’s parents. However, they refuse to acknowledge these results and their daughter’s death, and have requested a second examination.

In February 2025 — four months after the notification of death from the Russian Ministry of Defense and around the same time the body was repatriated to Ukraine – Volodymyr Roshchyn received a letter from the office of the Russian Human Rights Commissioner, Tatiana Moskalkova, in response to his inquiry. It stated that the issue of establishing Viktoriia Roshchyna’s location "is not being ignored."

The last trip

At the end of July 2023, Viktoriia Roshchyna crossed the border between Latvia and Russia at the Ludonka automobile checkpoint, 100 km from Pskov. We have obtained the migration card (a document filled out by foreign citizens crossing the Russian border), which Viktoriia used to enter Russia. She entered under her own name using her Ukrainian international passport. The purpose of the visit was listed as “private,” the destination — Melitopol.

Roshchyna was allowed to pass, although since the beginning of the war, she had been traveling to the occupied territories and publishing articles under her own name about the crimes of the Russian military, and had already been detained once. In March 2022, the journalist was captured in occupied Berdyansk while trying to travel from Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol with a Ukrainian humanitarian convoy. 

The reason for the detention was a message found on WhatsApp from the contact “SBU Zaporizhzhia” requesting her to publish a video of a Russian soldier talking about switching to the Ukrainian side. In captivity, Roshchyna was forced to record a video and say that she “has no complaints against Russia.” The recording shows her reciting memorized text, looking exhausted, but not intimidated. The journalist’s abduction was widely covered, and the Ukrainian side tried to secure her release.

After 10 days in captivity, Roshchyna was released, and 14 days later, she published a report “A Week in Captivity of the Occupiers.” Describing her captivity, the journalist wrote that she refused the food they brought her, ate her own supplies, and when they ran out, she drank tea. In the last days of her captivity, she “could barely stand up.”

“I believed I had to tell the truth from the blockaded city. It was my initiative,” Roshchyna wrote in her report. The desire to get into the occupied territories did not disappear even after her abduction. Just a week after her release, she told colleagues that she was going to get there again.

Few would be willing to take responsibility for a journalist on such a trip. Hromadske, the media where Roshchyna worked at the beginning of the war, did not publish her reports after her release from captivity.

Six months after her detention, the journalist finally reached the occupied territories. Already as a freelancer, she published reports about the pseudo-referendums, about the involvement of the FSB in the abductions of civilians in the occupied cities, about the fate of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant employees, about the abductions and torture. In her last article, Roshchyna wrote about two teenagers killed in Berdyansk.

“She would disappear for a while, for example, in the fall of 2022, when she was covering the so-called referendums. She simply disappeared for several weeks, and then reappeared with articles. She didn’t ask the editorial staff’s opinion; she just wrote the story and asked if we would publish it or not. If not, she would offer it to another media outlet,” says Sevgil Musayeva, editor-in-chief of Ukrainska Pravda.

It was in Ukrainska Pravda that Roshchyna published most of her war reports. Over the 30 months between the start of the war and her abduction, the journalist authored 44 articles for the outlet. She lived for her work; there were no weekends or vacations for her — this is how her former colleagues describe Roshchyna.

At least two more times after her first detention, Roshchyna managed to enter the occupied territories and return to Kyiv. Before the Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2022, the journalist used the checkpoint in Vasylivka in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast, and once traveled through Crimea. The trip in the summer of 2023 was at least her fourth, Musayeva says.

— She was interested in the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant; she had already covered this topic for us before. She also wanted to find the places where abducted Ukrainians are tortured, to find the people who are doing this. She wrote: “You can only understand the full picture by going there.” I asked: “Do you want to go to the occupied territories again?” She said yes. I didn’t reply. And the next day she said: “I know you’re against this, but know that I’m going anyway.”

The abduction

— Viktoriia is walking towards me in occupied Berdyansk. I ask: “How did you get here?”

And she tells me: “Don’t ask, everything is fine, I’m going to Mariupol.”

Olha (name changed for security reasons) recalls the first half of 2022. She is 59 years old, and after the start of the full-scale war, she found herself under occupation in a small town on the coast of the Sea of Azov in the Zaporizhzhia Oblast. She met Roshchyna in 2019 when the journalist came to her hometown to cover a high-profile trial. According to Olha’s memories, she was very impressed with how professionally Viktoriia worked.

From that moment on, Olha and Viktoriia stayed in touch. After the start of the full-scale war, Olha began to assist Roshchyna: she was telling her about the occupied territories and searching for contacts. Most of all, Roshchyna wanted to identify the FSB agents and military personnel who arrest and interrogate residents of the occupied territories.

The journalist managed to publish some of the information she gathered. She had access to a database with information on FSB officers — Viktoriia told both Sevgil Musayeva and Olha, who was assisting her, about it. “She sent me photos of FSB agents for identification [whether Olha had seen them in the city. — Ed.]. She just saw a lot of these... I won’t say ‘military,’ these scum, without masks,” Olha recalls and adds that Viktoriia was trying to find the people who had held her captive. According to information from the Ukrainian media Hromadske, these were FSB officers.

When Viktoriia went on her last trip to the occupied territories, Olha was no longer there — she was able to leave the occupied territory at the beginning of 2023. An acquaintance of Olha’s from Berdyansk agreed to help Roshchyna: to accompany her in the city. Mykola (name changed for security reasons) recalls that Viktoriia was interested in the Berdyansk restaurant Barracuda, which, according to him, is constantly visited by Russian FSB officers and military personnel. The man guided her there, but they stayed outside.

He then offered Roshchyna to stay at his place, but she declined. Mykola and Olha believe that she decided not to put her acquaintance at risk and probably had already noticed she was being followed.

According to Mykola, Viktoria was friendly but anxious — “as if she was smiling, but with a kind of sadness” — and emotionally reserved. From Berdyansk, Roshchyna asked to be taken to Enerhodar — another occupied city in Zaporizhzhia, but Mykola decided not to risk it and refused to go himself or find a driver. Roshchyna eventually managed to get to Enerhodar. This was the last city where she was seen free.

A single document in a year and a half

“Occupation is very dangerous. Even if there’s no shooting. Houses are being built, new jobs are appearing, social benefits are being paid, and food is cheaper than in Kyiv. But there’s no guarantee that you won’t simply be caught somewhere on the street just because,” is how Diana describes life under occupation. Her sister, former journalist Anastasiia Hlukhovska, was abducted in the same month as Viktoriia Roshchyna.

Anastasiia worked at RIA Melitopol before the war — writing news about road accidents, courts, and incidents in the city. “Harmless journalism,” is how Diana describes her sister’s work. “What Can the Residents of Melitopol Expect under a State of Emergency” is one of Anastasiia Hlukhovska’s last articles, written less than a day before the full-scale invasion. She quit on February 24th.

“We have the bitter experience of 2014, when territories were also occupied. It’s clear that journalists, pro-Ukrainian city heads, school principals — everyone is in danger. And on the very first day of the invasion, Nastia immediately quit,” says Diana.

According to her sister, Anastasiia knew that people were being abducted in the city, but they did not talk about it on the phone (Diana lived in Kyiv). Diana recalls that her sister did not feel safe in the occupied city, but she also refused to leave: “A person attached to her home, she had her boyfriend there, her mother and grandmother, she wouldn’t leave them. And after Kherson was liberated (in November 2022), everyone was inspired that Melitopol could also be de-occupied. We all hoped to see each other in the coming year.”

In August 2023, those hopes were dashed. Hlukhovska was abducted — early in the morning, people in uniform without insignia came and took the girl from her apartment. Anastasiia’s mother went from door to door at the commandant’s offices in Melitopol and neighboring settlements, where she was told that Anastasiia was not there and advised “not to bother them anymore.” The Melitopol police opened a missing person case. Diana, in Kyiv, filed reports about her sister’s abduction, hired a Russian lawyer, wrote to Russian authorities, and sent letters to Russian colonies and pre-trial detention centers.

“My mother and I have done absolutely everything we could,” says Diana. “I don’t know what else I haven’t done. And I have no results. There is only one single document that I received after a year and a half of her captivity.”

At the end of February 2025, the Red Cross recognized Anastasiia Hlukhovska as a prisoner of war, and the Russian side confirmed that she was in their custody. This is the only document her sister received. Only from this moment on was Anastasiia officially listed as a prisoner of war in Ukraine. “Until that moment, my statement meant nothing,” says her sister.

But even with the new status, there was no more clarity in Anastasiia’s case: “She has already been recognized as a prisoner of war. But we still don’t know where she is or for what reason. That is, yes, she is a prisoner, but why — no one will say. The lawyer should be provided with information, but this rule is not enforced at all.”

Recognition by the Red Cross guarantees a prisoner the right to correspondence. But Anastasiia’s family couldn’t even achieve this. “We wrote to a large number of detention centers. From some, there were replies that ’such a person is not held here.’ From others, there were no replies at all.”

Incommunicado

Both Anastasiia Hlukhovska and Viktoriia Roshchyna, and many other detained Ukrainian civilians, were and continue to be held incommunicado. This is the term for a situation where a prisoner has no connection with the outside world. In international law, incommunicado detention is considered a serious violation of human rights. Of the 35 abducted Ukrainian civilians whose stories we learned while working on the project, at least 19 experienced a complete lack of contact with the outside world.

Even lawyers cannot access a person held incommunicado. Lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov recalls his attempt to reach an abducted Ukrainian.

— The head of the Kursk pre-trial detention center, Aleksandr Baglai — a real butcher — received us and spoke very politely. He tried to pretend he didn’t know anything. It was a very strange conversation. When asked directly, “Where is this person?” he gave an evasive answer: “You know, this isn’t our problem.” When he realized we were absolutely certain the person was in their custody, he suggested we go to the military commandant’s office instead.

Communicating with representatives of the military police proved useless. The lawyer never managed to secure a meeting with the abducted person; instead, he only received advice to write a letter to the Russian human rights commissioner Tatyana Moskalkova. No one responded to it.

“This experience made it clear that for a lawyer, it’s impossible to reach people held incommunicado without charges,” says Zakhvatov. His client was “lucky” — after a year in captivity, he was exchanged. Often, people remain imprisoned with no way of even finding out where they are being held.

“We operate within the law — we’re lawyers. To take any action, there needs to be legal regulation of the issue. There’s specific legislation that applies here — the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war and civilians,” Zakhvatov explains. “Based on these two conventions, you can appeal to courts, try to argue something. But for that, courts must exist. And in Russia, they don’t.”

Secret prisons in the occupied territories

The only source of information for relatives of incommunicado prisoners is released cellmates. Twice, people who were imprisoned with Anastasiia contacted Diana. This is how she learned that immediately after the abduction, her sister was held somewhere in the basements in Melitopol, and in August 2024 — in Taganrog Pre-Trial Detention Center No. 2.

Basements, garages, industrial zones, and pits are typical detention locations for abducted Ukrainians in the occupied territories. By October 2023, in Melitopol alone, IStories established five unofficial locations where people were held: a vocational school building, commandant’s offices, the city police department, and garages under a bridge. By the end of 2024, journalists from RIA Melitopol, based on interviews with abductees, expanded the list to 13 locations.

Viktoriia Roshchyna followed a similar path. Her cellmate, who crossed paths with the journalist in prison, told her father about this. Before her arrest, Roshchyna, according to her cellmate, noticed a drone above her. Soon, Vika was arrested. After three days of arrest in Enerhodar, the journalist was transported to Melitopol. There, she spent four months in captivity in garages, where she was subjected to torture.

The abducted refer to the garages as an industrial zone under the bridge towards the Novy Melitopol district. According to a relative of one of the Melitopol residents, everyone in the city knows that prisoners are held there. We spoke with three men who passed through the Melitopol garages; all describe similar conditions.

At various times, between five and twenty people were held there. They were not taken outside and were routinely beaten. One abductee said they slept on doors laid out on the floor; another recalled sleeping on wooden pallets. In fall and winter, the cold was severe, and people had to wrap themselves in whatever jackets they could find. There were no hygiene products. One bucket served as a toilet for everyone. Food was scarce. Screams of people being beaten could be heard.

Viktoriia told her cellmate about an interrogator in Melitopol who was unstable and cruel: “She kept repeating the same thing — ‘he wasn’t human.’” The journalist said she had been tortured with electric shocks, including through her ears. Her cellmate saw fresh cut scars on her body.

How abductions occur in the occupied territories

48 hours is the maximum period, according to the Russian Constitution, for which a person can be detained before a court decision, and 30 days — if a person is suspected of committing a serious or especially serious crime in territories where martial law has been declared (the law was enacted in July 2023).

In reality, “detained” Ukrainians disappear for months and years.

From dozens of our interviews with relatives of prisoners and those who managed to return, one scenario emerges. A person is abducted by people without insignia, they do not identify themselves, do not present any documents, and do not explain anything to relatives. The person simply disappears. No one “knows” about them in the military commandant’s offices, the prosecutor’s office, the police, or the investigative committee. Sometimes, the local police even opens a “missing person” case.

It is unknown who exactly detained Viktoriia. Sevgil Musayeva recalls that in conversations with the journalist, she mentioned that she was trying to establish the identities of FSB officers involved in the abduction and torture of Ukrainians in Enerhodar.

A Russian lawyer defending Ukrainians, a former Russian military officer who carried out such detentions, and a European intelligence officer told us anonymously about the key role of the FSB in the detention of civilians in the occupied territories. The process they described coincides with the evidence of detained Ukrainians with whom we spoke.

FSB officers, using various technical means and agent work (or based on denunciations), establish the identities and places of residence of people suspected of passing information to the Ukrainian side. They themselves can come for the arrest or send a group of special forces or the Rosgvardia [National Guard]. During the arrest, the person may not be told anything. Then the suspect is taken to so-called intermediate prisons: these can be police stations in occupied cities, as well as basements, garages, or even pits. And the person remains completely at the mercy of the FSB officers.

Over three years of war, Russian forces have abducted 349 people in Melitopol and the Melitopol district alone, six of whom were journalists. 139 people are still in captivity. Three died before being released. The statistics on abductions are maintained by the Melitopol City Council’s project Abducted Melitopol Residents.

The peak of abductions occurred during the first year of occupation. Initially, representatives of local self-government were taken and persuaded to cooperate with the occupation authorities. The city’s mayor, Ivan Fedorov, also spent a week in captivity. He was pressured to write a letter of resignation and convince his team to continue working with the occupation authorities. Fedorov was exchanged for nine Russian conscripts.

With the start of the school year, teachers and principals who continued to teach according to Ukrainian standards began to be abducted. People were also taken simply for ransom — five to six thousand euros, and a person received a chance to be released and leave the occupied territory with their family.

From such unofficial detention centers, where people are held without any legal basis, there are several possible outcomes: transfer to official institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service in the occupied territories or in Russia, forced deportation, or release. Often, the released have their documents confiscated, and even if they wish to, they cannot leave the occupied territories. Over three years of war, Abducted Melitopol Residents has recorded the release of 207 people.

“You won’t find any logic in who gets released and who remains in captivity,” says lawyer Dmitry Zakhvatov, who worked with abducted Ukrainians. “Logic exists where there are administrative procedures. Here, there’s nothing of the sort. They just grab someone, drag them to the commandant’s office, start interrogation — are you a spy, a saboteur? If they’ve taken too many people, what then? They can kill them, or let them go. That’s how I see it.”

The abductions did not stop in the second or third year of the war. Since October 2023, when IStories published its first investigation into torture and abductions in Melitopol, Russian forces have abducted at least 55 more people there.

“I will get out of here at any cost.” Roshchyna in Taganrog

After Melitopol, both journalists — Viktoriia and Anastasiia — ended up in a detention center in Taganrog. Their relatives were informed of this by people who managed to get released from there. “I found out she had been tortured, even though there were no visible signs of physical abuse,” says Diana, sister of Anastasiia Hlukhovska. “Her emotional state was unstable — from deep despair to reassuring everyone that things would be fine. That’s very much like Nastia.”

She managed to learn very little about her sister’s detention conditions: when there were problems with her eyes, she was given medication; the food in Taganrog was bad, but edible. According to a former cellmate, Anastasiia even gained weight during her captivity. Diana worries that this might be due to health problems. More than six months have passed since August, and she does not know what is happening with her sister now.

Viktoriia Roshchyna was transferred to Taganrog in December 2023, a cellmate told her relatives. Viktoriia said to her cellmate that one of the servicemen who transported her from Melitopol to Taganrog offered her some kind of deal, which she refused because she “always adhered to her principles in life” — and did not compromise them this time.

As several sources confirm, Viktoriia Roshchyna was already brought to Taganrog Detention Center No. 2 in critical condition.

“She arrived already pumped full of some unknown medications,” says another former detainee who was held with Vika in the Taganrog pre-trial detention center. “At some point, she stopped eating. Her cellmates started telling the guards and the prison staff — that she’d stopped eating, that something needed to be done. They didn’t give a damn until her condition got seriously bad.”

Viktoriia’s cellmate confirms that during her detention in Taganrog, Roshchyna was in very poor condition and constantly asked for medical help: she had a fever, her period stopped, and she had stomach pains.

But even in this state, she maintained her courage. Yevgeny Markevich, a prisoner of war who was held in a cell next to Roshchyna’s in Taganrog, heard her talking to the guards.

— She told the prison guards right to their faces: “You are occupiers, you came to our country, you are killing our people... I will never cooperate with you!” She was probably saved by the fact that she was a woman. If I had said something like that, they would’ve killed me on the spot.

Roshchyna was rapidly losing weight. A cellmate told her father that the guards forced her to eat, but she hid and then threw away the food.

At some point, the journalist could no longer stand on her feet. “I will get out of here at any cost. Either alive, or like this,” Roshchyna told her cellmates. In the summer of 2024, she was taken to the hospital on a stretcher.

Another source confirmed to Viktoriia Roshchyna’s father that her condition was so critical that she was hospitalized: “Six armed men guarded her in the ward. I don’t know if she received adequate treatment, what diagnosis she was given, or why she wasn’t returned home after treatment.”

After the hospital, Roshchyna was transferred to a separate cell.

Taganrog Detention Center No. 2

Ukrainian prisoners call Taganrog Detention Center No. 2 (SIZO-2), where Viktoriia ended up, hell on Earth. “Even the term ‘concentration camp’ would be too mild for SIZO-2,” said one of the prisoners.

While working on this investigation, we spoke with ten former detainees of the Taganrog pre-trial detention center. They talk about constant torture, physical and emotional abuse, and humiliation. The most sophisticated and cruel tortures were used against prisoners of war, but civilians were also subjected to them. They were beaten, tortured with electricity, strangled, had dogs set on them, and tormented in other ways.

According to the recollections of former prisoners, SIZO-2 is equipped with special torture chambers, from which screams were often heard.

One of the 23 women who managed to be released during the exchange on September 13, on which Roshchyna was supposed to appear, is 37-year-old Yelyzaveta Shylyk from Starobilsk in the Luhansk Oblast. She served as an officer in the Armed Forces of Ukraine but resigned two months before the start of the invasion. 

At the beginning of the full-scale war, Yelyzaveta found herself in her native occupied city. Even before her captivity, while she was living under occupation, she was interrogated 13 times and tortured: “They thought I’d break, that I’d tell them who from [the Aidar battalion] is still there [under occupation] — whom also they could take for interrogations like they did with me.”

In January 2023, the woman with two small children made her third attempt to leave the occupied city, but she was detained by FSB officers. Yelyzaveta spent a year and eight months in captivity. She also went through SIZO-2 in Taganrog.

“Get ready, we’ll show you all the joys of life,” these were the words that greeted Yelyzaveta when she was met by the detention center staff. She was forced to undress completely and photographed from all sides. Other women have spoken about this practice.

“They twisted my arms behind my back so hard that they almost dislocated my shoulders. They led me down a corridor in handcuffs; I could only see my feet. They beat me under the ribs with a baton, a metal rod, on my back, legs, shoulder blades, and arms. They used a stun gun on me. They shouted: ‘Another Ukrainian whore arrived, we’re going to finish her off.’”

Almost all the Ukrainians we spoke to who had been in the Taganrog detention center, both civilians and military personnel, described beatings at the very beginning of their detention. The detention center staff call this “reception.” Out of 15 known cases of prisoners of war dying in SIZO-2, at least four died from beatings during “reception,” according to a Ukrainian intelligence document obtained by the project’s authors.

The prisoners were constantly monitored. Every two hours, a small window in the cell door would open, and Yelyzaveta had to stand up, turn to face the wall, bend over with her arms twisted behind her back, and say: “Greetings, officer.” When the peephole opened, which, according to Yelyzaveta’s recollections, happened every 10–15 minutes, she also had to turn to the wall and greet the officer. Twice a day, there were inspections where the prisoners had to stand facing the wall with their legs and arms spread wide, and during this time, the detention center staff often beat them on their legs, ribs, between the shoulder blades, and used a stun gun.

“They constantly shouted in your ear: ‘Whose Crimea is it?’ If you answered that Crimea is Ukraine, you could return to your cell on all fours.”

During numerous interrogations Yelyzaveta was brutally tortured, including with electroshock, by attaching electrodes to her toes. This is excruciating pain, which can cause heart failure. To intensify the electric shocks, they were applied to a wet body. Other survivors in Taganrog also tell about this.

Yelyzaveta was submerged in a bathtub filled with water and held there until she lost consciousness, she recalls. They beat her with a wooden board on her fingers and back. Her cellmate was beaten so severely with a board on her fingers that they turned black, and her nails came off.

A separate torture was poor and inedible food. The prisoners were fed damp bread. Sometimes they were given a pinch of buckwheat groats, thin soup with remnants of cabbage or onion, and a few boiled macaronis. The water was only from the tap, greenish in color, with the smell of “slop or rotten fish,” Yelyzaveta recalls.

Survivors of captivity recall a constant feeling of hunger; many lost 20–25 kg.

For nearly two years, throughout her captivity, Yelyzaveta did not go outside or see sunlight: “A ‘walk’ meant they might bend you in half, twist your arms behind your back, drag you to the so-called yard, and bring you right back. You wouldn’t even step inside. On the way, they’d insult you, beat you. They might hit your back to force you to bend lower. Then they’d just turn you around and send you back to the cell.”

One civilian detainee who spent over six months in SIZO-2 managed to send a letter to his family through a lawyer, describing a similar experience (a photo of the letter is in the authors’ possession):

— During inspections, which happened twice a day, security forces were beating us with fists and boots. We had to move through the prison with our backs arched, eyes closed, arms crossed behind our backs. During inspections, they came with dogs, used stun guns on us. We were completely cut off from care packages, letters, or any contact with a lawyer.

Not all prisoners withstood the abuse: some committed suicide by hanging themselves on the prison cell bars, recalls AFU company commander Serhiy Taraniuk.

“Scattered all over Russia”

After Taganrog, Yelyzaveta and other prisoners were transported to various colonies.

— Scattered all over Russia. Some were sent to Udmurtia, some to Krasnodar Krai, some to the territory of Crimea, some to the territory of Samara Oblast. This was done so that we would not end up in places of detention with our fellow people. [In the colonies] they tried to convince us: “Forget about this exchange! Ukraine doesn’t need you. Ukraine has forgotten you.”

In the first year of the war, abducted Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war were held in 22 institutions of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) in Russia and the occupied territories. Over three years of war, the number of such places has grown more than eightfold, reaching 186, according to human rights defenders from the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties, winner of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize.

“The Russian authorities do not want a high concentration of Ukrainians in any given institution. A high concentration of Ukrainians means a large number of people who have the potential for resistance. And, obviously, a decision was made in the Kremlin to disperse the Ukrainians so that there would be relatively few of them in each place. Therefore, they began to look for places. Such places where Ukrainians are isolated from Russian prisoners who are also held there. As a result, the spread went all the way to the Far East. This is already the entire territory of Russia,” says Mikhail Savva, an expert at the center.

Taganrog pre-trial detention center is a terrible but not the only place where Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war are subjected to torture. A UN report released in March 2025 lists 34 locations, including several unofficial ones (schools, industrial zones, etc.). Based on two sources — the UN report and a document from Ukrainian intelligence from October 2024 (which presents the results of a survey of military personnel and civilians who went through Russian captivity and were released during exchanges) — the project authors identified 29 FSIN institutions where torture is practiced systematically.

Almost 700 cases of torture are listed in the UN report and the Ukrainian intelligence document. The most frequent torture is regular beatings; they are used in every FSIN torture facility. Also, in almost every such prison, security forces torture with electricity and heated objects, use sexualized violence, strangle, use psychological violence, and other forms of abuse.

Those who survived torture most often mention Penal Colony 10 in the village of Udarny in Mordovia — at least 49 cases of torture were recorded; Penal Colony 120 in Molodizhne, Volnovakha district, Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine (Olenivka) — 47 cases.

In third place is Detention Center No. 2 in Taganrog, where Viktoriia Roshchyna was held for nine months, with 44 cases of torture recorded.

Chances of release

Abducted Ukrainians who end up in the Federal Penitentiary Service system have almost no chance of being released. There are no exchanges for civilians because there is no one to exchange such a number of abducted people for: Ukraine has not kidnapped peaceful Russian citizens. (According to information from the Russian authorities, 52 residents of the Kursk Oblast, who were taken away during active fighting in the region, are still in Ukraine, but they are being returned outside of exchanges.)

Since the beginning of the full-scale war, only 171 abducted Ukrainian civilians have returned home, according to the human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties.

A source among Russian lawyers familiar with the exchange process, in a conversation with journalists, called it “a completely non-transparent and very unfair instrument.”

Dmytro Lubinets, the Ukrainian Parliament’s Commissioner for Human Rights, said that the number of civilian Ukrainian prisoners could reach 16,000 — this is the number of people in the Ukrainian registry of civilians “missing under special circumstances.” It is known for certain that 1,800 people are in Russian captivity — this has been confirmed by the International Red Cross. The Ukrainian authorities do not know what is happening to the rest.

Formal charges have been brought against only a small portion of those abducted. By October 2024, 543 Ukrainians were defendants in criminal cases, human rights activists calculated. 307 of them are civilians abducted from the occupied territories. More than 60% are accused of espionage or terrorism, but there are also cases of treason — for Ukrainians who managed to obtain Russian passports. 

If a specific crime has not been imputed, people are imprisoned “for opposing the special military operation.” This phrase regularly appears in letters that relatives of the abducted receive from the Russian Ministry of Defense.

If a person has the status of an accused, a lawyer can visit them, they can exchange letters with relatives, they can receive parcels, and they are “visible” in the system. Those held without charges are impossible to reach.

Orders for the detention of individuals who have not been charged are signed by the heads of regional FSB directorates. Several Russian lawyers learned about this “due to an oversight by government agencies,” said Mikhail Savva.

“This is absolutely illegal. Perhaps some internal Russian documents regulate this, but they are not published anywhere. They are classified,” the human rights activist comments on the established mechanism.

Yelyzaveta was exchanged only on the eighth attempt, she says: “[Before the exchange on September 13] I was removed from the exchange list seven times. Several times I was already taken to the bus for the exchange, but during the verification of the lists, the FSB simply turned me back.”

The FSB leadership does indeed always carefully study the exchange lists to ensure that the people most undesirable to them are removed from this list by any means, IStories’ sources told.

In early September, Roshchyna was taken out of her cell to record a video with testimony and sign some documents along with other prisoners, her former cellmate told Viktoriia’s father.

After that, no one saw her.

Mikhail Chaplya is a former prisoner of war who passed through the Taganrog pre-trial detention center and was exchanged on September 13. He recalls that a few days before that, he was taken out of the detention center, put in a truck with a woman of about fifty, and driven to the point

of exchange. He is sure that they were the only prisoners transferred from Taganrog: “Viktoriia was not in our truck.”

Why the journalist’s exchange did not take place and what happened to Viktoriia after she left the cell could not be determined. Three weeks later, the family received a notification of her death.

Viktoriia Roshchyna was not the only one who died while awaiting exchange. Over three years of war, the Russian government returned the bodies of 160 Ukrainians who died in Russian prisons.

We sent questions to the press service of the President of Russia, as well as the Ministry of Defense, the FSB, the Federal Penitentiary Service, and the Main Directorate of Military Police — no responses were received by the time of publication.

Editor: Maria Zholobova