Viktoriia Roshchyna disappeared in August 2023 in a part of Ukraine now occupied by Russian forces.
It took nine months for Russian authorities to confirmed the journalist had been detained. They gave no reason.
This week, her father got a terse letter from the defence ministry in Moscow informing him that Victoria was dead, aged 27.
The document said the journalist’s body would be returned in one of the swaps organised by Russia and Ukraine for soldiers killed on the battlefield. The death date was given as 19 September.
This weekend, friends gathered to remember Viktoriia on the Maidan in central Kyiv. They shuffled into position on the steps holding her photograph, young face smiling out at the small crowd.
“She had huge courage,” one woman began the tributes.
“We will miss her enormously,” said another, turning away as her eyes filled with tears.
Viktoriia’s stories were snapshots of life that Ukrainians were not getting from anywhere else.
Reporting from occupied areas of Ukraine was extremely dangerous, but her colleagues remember how she was desperate to go there, even after she was detained and held in custody the first time, for ten days.
Her parents used to call and tell us to stop deploying her, but we never did deploy her!” one of her former bosses recalled.
“All her editors tried to stop her. But it was impossible.”
The young reporter eventually went freelance in order to deploy herself and when she got back newspapers would buy her reports.
Most strikingly, she never used a pseudonym even though she wrote openly of "occupied" territory and referred to those who collaborated with the Russians as "traitors".
“She wanted to provide information about how those cities live under siege by the Russian army,” Sevgil Musaieva, editor-in-chief at Ukrayinska Pravda, told the BBC.
