Viktoria Roshchyna reported from places most other Ukrainian journalists would not go. She was one of the last to report openly from the territory in Ukraine forcibly taken by Russian troops. And then she went further and entered Russia.

Roshchyna, known as Vika, was arrested her father said, and died in September, more than a year later. The circumstances of her death remain unclear, as is what she intended to do in Russia. Some have suggested she planned to travel through Russia into occupied Ukraine. She was 27.

Ukrainians have mourned Roshchyna’s death, for the tragic loss of a young life, but also because of the stories she wrote from parts of the country where many had been forced to flee. Her stories had been an important lifeline for them.

Roshchyna was known as a brave, stubborn and driven journalist. Soon after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, she joined a humanitarian convoy and tried to cross into the besieged southeastern port city of Mariupol, as almost everyone else was trying to leave. Russian forces captured her in March. They released her a week later, after beating her, she said.

Instead of fleeing, Roshchyna bought a new camera in Zaporizhzhya, a city in southern Ukraine, and hopped on a bus back into Russian-occupied territory. She appeared not to tell anyone where she was going, not even her bosses at Hromadske, the online news outlet where she worked.

When Russia invaded eastern Ukraine in 2014, many Ukrainian journalists unexpectedly became combat reporters. Back then, I, too, travelled to the frontline many times. But my biggest fear was being captured by Russian troops and I never went to what become known as the “occupied territories”.

Many other journalists did, wanting to show the world what was happening in the Ukrainian cities and towns that had been taken by the Russians.

At a certain point, editors and colleagues tried to stop her from going across the frontline. But she was determined. Hromadske stopped working with her after she bought the new camera and went back into Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory without telling her bosses.

She did leave Ukraine that August, travelling to Poland, Latvia and then, finally, Russia. Many of the people who knew her assumed she planned to cross from Russia into occupied Ukraine. It is still not clear where exactly she was arrested.

She wasn’t heard from for eight months, and then there was news that she had been arrested in Russia. On September 19, she was scheduled to be transferred to a Moscow prison from a pretrial detention centre. Roshchyna died before she arrived at the prison and her family was informed about her death by 3 weeks later.

New York Times News Service