14 Oct 24 | News and features, Russia, Statements, Ukraine
Index on Censorship, the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) and partner organizations today mourn the death of Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchyna, who died in unclear circumstances while in Russian detention, and whose death was confirmed by Russian and Ukrainian authorities on Thursday. We welcome the opening of an investigation by Ukrainian authorities on grounds of “war crime combined with premeditated murder” and demand that Russian authorities do the same to elucidate the circumstances of Roshchyna’s death and bring to justice all those who could be responsible.
Roshchyna, a freelance journalist with Ukrainska Pravda, a major Ukrainian publication, and several other leading Ukrainian outlets, left Kyiv in late July 2023 with the intention to reach Russian-occupied territory in southeastern Ukraine. Soon after her departure, she went missing, with many of her colleagues expressing their fear that she was most likely being held by Russian forces.
In May 2024, nearly a year after her departure, Roshchyna’s family reported that Russian authorities had confirmed to them that the journalist was being held in Russian custody. However, the charges against her, as well as the place of her detention remained unknown.
Following the announcement of her death, reports emerged suggesting that Roshchyna had spent the past four months in an individual prison cell in the Russian city of Taganrog, which is located immediately next to the Ukrainian border. Prior to this, it has been reported that she was held in pre-trial detention by Russian forces in Berdyansk, a city in southeastern Ukraine currently under Russian occupation.
According to Russian authorities, Roshchyna died on September 19. Unconfirmed reports by Ukrainian media suggest that she passed away while being transported from Taganrog to Moscow. According to the same reports, Russia was preparing to include Roshchyna into a prisoner exchange with Ukraine.
While it is unclear what location the journalist managed to reach as part of the reporting trip she began in late July 2023, it was known that she planned to report from regions of Ukraine under Russian occupation.
“Victoria was herself from the Zaporizhia region,” Ukrainska Pravda editor-in-chief Sevgil Musayeva told IPI in October 2023, when Roshchyna’s disappearance was first made public. “She saw it as her mission to tell the stories of the people under occupation and when fears grew that the Russian military may be planning to blow up the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant, she wanted to go.”
Roshchyna was one of the very few Ukrainian journalists to travel to Russian-occupied territories to cover the impact of the war. In March 2022, she was taken captive by Russian forces while reporting near Mariupol, when the city was under a prolonged siege by Russian forces. She was released ten days later and continued working as a journalist from Kyiv. She documented her experiences in captivity here.
MFRR partners, Index on Censorship and Reporters Without Borders (RSF) reiterate their support of journalists who continue to report on Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. We mourn the death of yet another journalist who lost her life while attempting to cover the consequences of this brutal invasion, and demand justice for her and other deceased colleagues.
Signed:
International Press Institute (IPI)
European Centre for Press and Media Freedom (ECPMF)
The European Federation of Journalists (EFJ)
Index on Censorship
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
ARTICLE 19 Europe
OBC Transeuropa (OBCT)
International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF)
Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ)
Free Press Unlimited (FPU)
12 Oct 24 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
This article was first published on 5 April 2022 and is being republished following confirmation of her death in Russian custody.
I was in Zaporizhzhia on the morning of 12 March. I wanted to get to Mariupol to write an article; I thought that I had to tell the truth from the blocked city. It was my initiative.
I found out that a humanitarian convoy was going to Mariupol. I went to the assembly point but the convoy had already left. I contacted the authorities and asked them if I could catch it up. They replied that I could try. I did not find a personal driver, so I left with another convoy heading to Polohy. We caught up the Mariupol convoy near Vasylivka, and I continued with them.
I came across the occupiers’ first checkpoint in Vasylivka. Russian soldiers thoroughly checked me. They made me unzip my coat and show the contents of my bag. They found a camera and asked if I was a journalist. I confirmed this. They told me that I had no business in Mariupol and that I should return to Zaporizhzhia. They inspected my phone and camera and found nothing. I asked permission to continue with the column. The occupiers did not mind. We stopped overnight in Berdyansk.
We continued our way in the morning but we were stopped near the city limits and we were told to wait for permission. We were waiting for two or three hours by a crossroads where the roads to Mangush, Energodar and Vasylivka go. Rumours started to spread that we wouldn’t be allowed to move.
Cars passed by and a woman from the convoy told us that she had found some local guys who were willing to drive us to Mariupol. When we arrived at the agreed place, the car was no longer there. The Russian military told us to wait and started talking with us.
I stepped aside. I was thinking of returning to the convoy but a Russian soldier approached me and asked me to show him my phone. He told me that he had instructions from above to check me.
He asked if I was a journalist. I did not lie as it could make things even worse. He asked to show him my WhatsApp account and he saw the contact of the security services of Zaporizhzhia. There was a message with a request to publish a video of a Russian soldier who had swapped sides to join Ukraine.
Some other soldiers began to interrogate me. Then they spoke with Metropolitan Luka [a priest of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church]. Luka and other clerics were leading the convoy. When they returned, they said I had to go with them. I was put into a prison van accompanied by four Chechen paramilitaries who took me to the Berdyansk district administration office.
I was met by people dressed in black and wearing balaclavas. They seemed to be very young, less than 30 years old. They started to interrogate me, searching me and inspecting my phone and documents. They told me that I was not a journalist but a spy and a propagandist which I denied. It lasted for an hour. Then, one of them said: “Everything is clear with you”. I realised later they were from the Russian security services, the FSB.
One of the men in balaclavas brought in his commander. When I asked him who he was, he replied: “I am the man. You have two options: you either go to a jail for women or to a Dagestani military base.” I asked them what that meant. They did not explain. Then two men grabbed me, put a blindfold over my eyes and took me out of the room. I was crying, explaining that I was a journalist, that people would be looking for me, and that they would not get away with it. They took me to the local office of the SBU, the Ukrainian Security Service.
I was met by Chechens and Dagestanis who put me in a tiny room with a chair, a table and a window which they closed and told me not to approach it. They brought a blanket on which I slept on the floor. It was light and warm there. I was taken out only to the bathroom. Almost all my stuff was taken. When I asked when they would let me go, they answered, “When Kyiv is taken”. They added “Luka is in charge of the convoy and he refused to take you”.
From time to time, I was interrogated by Russian occupiers.
“We have no conscience. The law does not exist for us,” the FSB guys said. “Ukraine does not exist anymore.”
They repeated this every day.
“If we bury you somewhere here, no one will ever find out. You will be lost forever,” they said.
I had no fear. I knew they were trying to break me. But I felt desperate because I knew nothing about the outside world, and I was not able to do my job.
“We do not fucking care that you are a woman and a journalist,” they shouted.
But I knew the fact that I was a journalist restrained them.
At some point Chechens joined in with the daily moral pressure of the FSB guys. They guarded me and tried to convince me to cooperate.
“They are serious. They won’t let you go for nothing. You’d better to cooperate with them because you are so young. Otherwise, you will stay here forever,” they said.
They added: “We are the power. They are the brains.”
They brought me some food, but I refused. The first days I ate my remaining supplies from Zaporizhzhia. When it was finished, I took nothing but sweet tea. I felt my energy leave me. It was difficult just to get on my feet. During the last visit of the FSB men, I was not able to stand. But I continued to demand my release. When I cried too loud, one of the Chechens hit me and told me that I wasn’t at home, and I should watch my tone.
There were a few empathetic men among them, nevertheless. They came to ask if I was OK, asked me to eat something and begged me not to kill myself.
I asked to be allowed to make a call. They refused. Afterwards, the FSB told me that there would be a neutral interview and then I would be released. I insisted that I wouldn’t lie. They agreed. They brought a camera after a while. They had a prepared text with them, and they demanded I read it. I did not agree with the wording “high probability of having saved her life”. Eventually I agreed to shoot the video and they dropped the previous demands regarding full support of Russian actions and accusations against Ukraine.
Once the video was completed, they took me to another place. It was the local jail in Berdyansk. They refused to return my phone and camera as they considered them “propaganda tools”.
I spent the night in a room with a Russian soldier, who was supposed to guard me. The electricity and heating were cut off during the night. It was very cold. With my flashlight I counted the hours until morning. The soldier told me that the people who had interrogated me were from FSB. He was afraid that I would kill him during the night. He asked me whether I considered them as occupiers. Then he put the Ukrainian flag and the national emblem near me and said: “This is to calm you down. You see, we did not destroy them.”
In the morning, they blindfolded me again. Then they took me out of the jail and showed me the direction to go. I reached the closest bus station and went to the location of an evacuation convoy. I left with them the next day to territory controlled by Ukraine.
I am sincerely grateful to everyone who put in their efforts to find me and release me.
This account was first published by independent Ukrainian news channel hromadske and is published here in English for the first time.
20 Sep 24 | News and features, Ukraine, United Kingdom
It was a genuine privilege to co-host the UK premiere of the film From Babyn Yar to Freedom this week in collaboration with the theatre company Dash Arts. Made by Ukrainian director Oleg Chorny in 2017, the film tells the life story of the Soviet writer Anatoly Kuznetsov and his mission to bring the world’s attention to the full horror of the Babyn Yar massacre of September 1941. Kuznetsov defected to the UK in 1969 with the smuggled, uncensored text of his masterpiece, Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel.
Babyn Yar was a ravine in Kyiv that witnessed the “Holocaust by bullets” of 100,000 predominantly Jewish people. However, before the publication of Kuznetsov’s book in the West, the Moscow authorities had insisted on the essentially Soviet-Ukrainian identity of the victims.
The private screening of the film was made possible by the Jewish Community centre, JW3, which hosted the invitation-only premiere. The remarkable film traces Kuznetsov’s life in Kyiv and London by talking to those who knew him, including his son Olexiy, whom the writer left behind in the Soviet Union when he fled to the West.
Unfortunately, it has not been possible to release the film more widely because of a dispute over footage from a 1969 interview with Kuznetsov by CBS News journalist Morley Safer. Index and Dash hope publicity around the screening will held break the deadlock over the rights to the interview.
The screening was followed by a discussion led by Josephine Burton, the artistic director of Dash Arts, who used Kuznetsov’s words in the 2021 production Songs for Babyn Yar. Burton has been a tireless advocate for the film and contacted me after I launched a fundraiser for Kuznetsov’s unmarked grave in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Director Oleg Chorny and assistant producer Natalia Klymchuk fielded questions from the audience over video link from Kyiv.
Several mysteries still surround the story of Kuznetsov. Was he right to suspect he was being targeted by the KGB in London? Was his death from a heart attack at 49 in 1979 suspicious? And why does his surviving daughter not want his grave marked?
Index will follow up on suggestions from audience members about the rights issues over the interview footage and we call on CBS to do the decent thing and ensure the film is released to the wider television and cinematic audience it deserves.
You can read about From Babyn Yar to Freedom in the latest edition of Index. Dash Arts is currently working on a new project on Ukraine, The Reckoning in collaboration with The Reckoning Project, based on testimonies of Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
22 Jul 24 | Germany, News and features, Ukraine
The Babyn Yar massacre is one of the bloodiest atrocities in Ukraine’s dark history. In late September 1941, 33,771 Jewish residents of Kyiv were herded by the Nazis into a ravine (“Babi Yar” in Russian, “Babyn Yar” in Ukrainian) on the outskirts of the city. Over a two-day period, the victims were shot and buried in mass graves as part of what became known as “the Holocaust of Bullets”.
Oleg Chorny’s small-budget feature documentary From Babi Yar to Freedom tells the story of the massacre through the lens of Soviet defector and writer Anatoly Kuznetsov, who first revealed the full scale of the atrocity to the world when he escaped to the UK in 1969. The film was completed in 2017, five years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and is an extraordinary tribute to Kuznetsov’s determination to tell the truth in the face of a wall of Soviet censorship and disinformation.
Chorny’s documentary deserves a wide international audience, but in an irony that would not be lost on the dissidents of the 1960s, no one can see it because of a rights dispute over the central archive interview in the film owned by the giant US TV corporation CBS.
In July 1969, shortly after Kuznetsov defected, he gave a lengthy interview to the veteran CBS news journalist Morley Safer in which he opened up about his decision to escape the Soviet Union. Kuznetsov went to London, accompanied by a KGB minder, to research the time Lenin had spent there in 1903, and secretly took with him film containing the text of the full version of his book Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel, stitched into his clothing. The book is based on eyewitness accounts of the massacre and Kuznetsov’s own boyhood diary.
Now, Chorny has been told that nine minutes of CBS footage from the Kuznetsov interview (freely available on YouTube) will cost $80,000 – more than the budget of the movie. Wazee Digital, a Colorado-based asset management company which negotiates on behalf of CBS, has refused to budge on this fee.
Chorny told Index that the fate of the film and the fate of Kuznetsov were intertwined in his mind. “I’m sorry, you must understand that the story with this film is a sad story for me because it was not released… But if something happened and this movie was released, I think it would be so important, because nothing has changed from these times with the KGB. You can call it the FSB, but it does not matter.”
In the documentary, Chorny follows Ukrainian writer Stanislav Tsalyk as he tracks down traces of Kuznetsov – who died in 1979 – in Kyiv and then in London. Tsalyk travels to the UK with Kuznetsov’s son Olexiy, who remained in the Soviet Union. In one of the most moving scenes, Olexiy stands next to his father’s unmarked grave in Highgate Cemetery. Olexiy, too, has now died without seeing the film released.
The story of Kuznetsov is a classic Cold War tale, but it is much more than that. It is a story about how stories themselves are told, how they can be misrepresented, and how they are suppressed.
Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar has had many lives and suffered multiple rounds of censorship. When it was first published in the Soviet Union in 1966, the censor made cuts that underplayed the suffering of the Jews. In the Soviet narrative, Babi Yar was known as a Nazi act of horror against Soviet citizens. The Jews of Kyiv were thus doubly erased: once literally and then historically. This was not all that was removed from the original text: references to cannibalism during the Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor, where millions died as a direct result of Stalin’s policies, and parallels between fascism and communism were all excised. Anything, in fact, that showed the Soviets as less than heroic.
The whole uncensored version is recognised as a singular masterpiece. The first chapter, Ashes, begins: “This book contains nothing but the truth.” The typefaces of the book reveal its troubled publication history, with the original text in plain type, previously censored passages rendered in bold, and later additions from Kuznetsov in square brackets.
Oddly, this adds to the experience of reading Babi Yar. Its fragmented text suits the battered and broken subject matter.
Take the following passage about Dina Pronicheva, a 30-year-old puppet-theatre actor and survivor of the massacre who later gave evidence against the Nazis. “Dina went across the hillock and sat down. Everybody there was silent, crazed with fright. She was afraid to look up: somebody might recognise her, quite by chance, and cry out: ‘She’s a dirty Jewess!’ These people would stop at nothing to save their own skins. For that reason she tried not to look at anybody, and nobody looked at her. Only an old woman sitting next to her in a fluffy knitted scarf complained quietly to Dina that she had been seeing her daughter-in-law off and had got caught… But she herself was a Ukrainian, she was no Jewess, and whoever thought it would come to this? They had all been seeing people off.”
The censored words in bold give the episode a very different meaning and emotional impact.
When Babi Yar was republished in a Vintage Classics edition in the UK last year under the title Babi Yar: The Story of Ukraine’s Holocaust, it didn’t receive the attention it deserved.
When I talked to Chorny in Kyiv over Zoom, I suggested that this latest episode in the story of the massacre is part of a pattern. I said: “Even if you go back to the origins of the story… This is a story about silence. It’s a story about censorship. It’s a story about not being able to tell the story and so…”
Chorny stopped me and said my interpretation did not go far enough: “Excuse me, this is a story of a totalitarian system which is the same as the Nazi totalitarian system. And this is a story of resistance – Anatoly Kuznetsov’s personal resistance, I mean: to escape to publish the full version in the West.”
Josephine Burton of Dash Arts has been pushing for the release of Chorny’s film since 2021, when her organisation began work on Songs of Babyn Yar, a music and theatre project that used Kuznetsov’s text in the production. Burton, who also championed the cause of the Crimean Tatars in Dash Arts’ 2022 performance Crimea 5am, told Index: “Oleg Chorny’s documentary needs to be seen. It tells a remarkable story, a vital contribution to the history of Ukraine and the Holocaust. This film should not be silenced.”
Chorny has also gained the support of the Koffler Centre in Toronto, which ran a series of events about the Babyn Yar massacre last year, including a Zoom discussion with Chorny and his team.
In the meantime, Chorny describes life in Kyiv: “We are living some kind of surrealistic reality. This is mixed with news from the front from our colleagues and friends. A lot of losses. Especially in the last year, we buried a lot of friends and some colleagues who disappeared on the front line.”
But the director has kept himself busy. Chorny has made a short film, Kyiv in the Days of War, about the aftermath of the Russian attacks in 2022, and three 15-minute films in a series about creativity and the Ukraine conflict: Art in the Land of War. In one of these, If I Stop It Means They Win, sculptor and graphic artist Oleksandr Smyrnov says: “I think that if they prevent me from doing what I’m good at and what I want to do, then they have won. That’s why I’ll keep doing it.”
Two years ago, an appeal to raise money for a headstone for Kuznetsov in Highgate cemetery raised more than $1,300. In another twist in the story, his surviving daughter has not given her permission for it to be erected. The best memorial would be the release of From Babi Yar to Freedom. [CBS was approached for a comment on this story.]
