#save mariupol

[mewlabu]

What the beautiful city of Mariuopil looks like now after Russian 'liberation"

[sporadicneckmoneyfan]

Маріуполь Mariupol

[mdoesitmatter]

You love books? Good thing you aren’t Ukrainian.

A try not post anything on the topic of w@r on this account but this situation ruined on another level. My hands are shaking as I write this.

Today, on 23th of May ru$$ians made a massive missile attack on Kharkiv and one of those missiles destroyed one of the biggest Printing Enterprises in Ukraine. 7 people was found dead (for this moment), more 40 was seriously injured and thousands of books completely destroyed. My favourite publisher manufactured their books there as well as 17 others. Years of work are gone in a blink of an eye. And it was just 1 out of 15 missiles.

Many books on my shelves was made there. But because we are neighbours with terr0ristic state my passion to literature costed people their lives.

Because that is what Ru$$ians do. They destroy every single aspect of our lives. They k!ll our people. They bring destruction and de@th. They don’t want to win to win the w@r, they want to erase Ukraine from the face of this Earth.

I understand that my home country isn’t the only one to struggle right now, but I am not going to apologies for wanting to help my people. War is still going. They b0mb us every day. People d!e every day. Every day I call my loved ones, fully aware that they might not pick up and that last time I talked with them was the last. I fear that I will never return home.

If Russia stop fighting — there is gonna be no war.

If Ukraine stop fighting — there is gonna be no Ukraine.

Save Ukraine.

Save Ukrainian people.

Arm Ukraine.

Слава Україні!

[animusrox]

TOP 10

Past Lives

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

How to Blow Up a Pipeline

Poor Things

Oppenheimer

Barbie

BlackBerry

The Holdovers

The Iron Claw

Killers of the Flower Moon

MY LETTERBOXD Grade A 11.    The Killer 12.    Beau Is Afraid 13.    Dream Scenario 14.    Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 15.    Godzilla Minus One 16.    American Fiction 17.    They Cloned Tyrone 18.     Evil Dead Rise 19.    Eileen 20.    The Artifice Girl 21.   Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem 22.    Talk to Me 23.    Reality 24.    Leave the World Behind 25.    A Thousand and One 26.    Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One 27.    Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. 28.    Theater Camp 29.   Carmen 30.    Merry Little Batman 31.    Priscilla 32.    Society of the Snow 33.    Infinity Pool 34.    Enys Men 35.    Sanctuary 36.    Rye Lane 37.    Skinamarink 38.    Monster 39.    Anatomy of a Fall 40.    Landscape with Invisible Hand 41.    Reptile 42.    Sisu 43.    Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game 44.    No One Will Save You 45.    Tetris 46.    May December 47.    The Zone of Interest 48.    V/H/S/85 49.    Dumb Money 50.    El Conde 51.    Arnold 52.    Maestro 53.    Napoleon 54.    20 Days in Mariupol 55.    Influencer 56.    The Creator 57.    Origin 58.    Thanksgiving 59.    Next Goal Wins 60.    The Boy and the Heron 61.    Bottoms 62.    Wonka

[Press Keep Reading For The Full Graded List]

Grade B

63.   God Is a Bullet 64.    No Hard Feelings 65.    Joy Ride 66.    Fair Play 67.     Cocaine Bear 68.    NYAD 69.    Asteroid City 70.    Nowhere 71.    The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster 72.    Divinity 73.    The Equalizer 3 74.    The Last Voyage of the Demeter 75.    Venus 76.    Butcher’s Crossing 77.    Somewhere in Queens 78.    The Persian Version 79.    Boston Strangler 80.    Polite Society 81.    Miguel Wants to Fight 82.    The Color Purple 83.    The Royal Hotel 84.    Saw X 85.    All of Us Strangers 86.    Fallen Leaves 87.    Ferrari 88.    Elemental 89.    Peter Pan & Wendy 90.    Renfield 91.    Cat Person 92.    Scream VI 93.    The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes 94.    BS High 95.    Blue Beetle 96.    Huesera: The Bone Woman 97.    When Evil Lurks 98.    Dark Harvest 99.    A Good Person 100.    Final Cut 101.    Knock at the Cabin 102.    Quiz Lady 103.    Leo 104.    Air 105.    The Super Mario Bros. Movie 106.    Batman: The Doom That Came to Gotham 107.    John Wick: Chapter 4 108.    Beaten to Death 109.    The Wrath of Becky 110.    Passages 111.    Transformers: Rise of the Beasts 112.    Gran Turismo 113.    65 114.    Sick 115.    Sister Death 116.    The Blackening 117.    Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain 118.    Flamin’ Hot 119.    Nimona 120.    Cobweb 121.    Totally Killer 122.    What’s Love Got to Do with It? 123.     Sharper 124.    Unseen 125.    Dunki 126.    Bird Box Barcelona 127.    The Marvels 128.    Shazam! Fury of the Gods

Grade C

129.   Wildflower 130.    Freelance 131.    M3GAN 132.    Strays 133.    Sympathy for the Devil 134.    Creed III 135.    Chevalier 136.    The Marsh King’s Daughter 137.    A Haunting in Venice 138.    The Little Mermaid 139.    Silent Night 140.    Master Gardener 141.    The Flash 142.    Fast X 143.    The Pope’s Exorcist 144.    Saltburn 145.    Kandahar 146.    Stand 147.    Plane 148.   Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny 149.    Fingernails 150.    Quicksand 151.    Fool’s Paradise 152.    Migration 153.    Rustin 154.    The Covenant 155.    Good Burger 2 156.    The Pod Generation 157.    Alice, Darling 158.    Insidious: The Red Door 159.    Missing 160.    Shotgun Wedding 161.    You Hurt My Feelings 162.    The Boogeyman 163.    Showing Up 164.    Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom 165.    Champions 166.    Consecration 167.    The Nun II 168.    Biosphere 169.    House Party 170.    The Exorcist: Believer 171.    Big George Foreman 172.    Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves 173.    Children of the Corn 174.    The Beanie Bubble 175.    Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

Grade F

176.    Anyone But You 177.    Marlowe 178.    Paint 179.    Extraction 2 180.    It Lives Inside 181.    Deliver Us 182.    Trolls Band Together 183.    Finestkind 184.    Corner Office 185.    Wish 186.    Prisoner’s Daughter 187.    Pain Hustlers 188.    Foe 189.    The Mother 190.    Old Dads 191.    Ghosted 192.    Ruby Gillman, Teenage Kraken 193.    Haunted Mansion 194.    Mafia Mamma 195.    Five Nights at Freddy’s 196.    The Machine 197.    Justice League: Warworld 198.    We Have a Ghost 199.    What Comes Around 200.    Legion of Super-Heroes 201.    The Boys in the Boat 202.    Attachment 203.    Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre 204.    About My Father 205.    You People 206.    Meg 2: The Trench 207.    Pathaan 208.    Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire 209.    Assassin 210.    Dalíland 211.    Vacation Friends 2

Bottom 10

212.    Sound of Freedom 213.    Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey 214.    When You Finish Saving The World 215.    Heart of Stone 216.    Family Switch 217.    Expend4bles 218.    Sweetwater 219.    Hypnotic 220.    80 for Brady 221.    Spinning Gold

[panimoonchild]

Fight for them as they fought for you

Mykyta Tatyanko "Zhyvchyk", a soldier of the 501st separate marine battalion, is still in captivity. He hit the front pages of all the world's media because he was simply helping the wounded during the shelling of the Mariupol maternity hospital. Because he just wanted to save someone.

In Mariupol, Zhyvchyk provided moral support to the locals. Ksenia, a resident of the city, met the soldier when a residential area was shelled. That day, March 12, her family was injured and slaughtered - her 16-year-old son and her sister's husband were killed instantly. "I was in a state of shock: I wanted to commit suicide because half of my family was killed in front of me, and the other half was not sure if they would survive," Ksenia said. The young defender helped the woman to keep her morale up. Mykyta convinced her that she shouldn't do anything to herself because many people around her needed help. "You are needed here, let's go help," Ksenia recalls. Ksenia told Mykyta's mother, Larysa, everything in detail, and told her that she had become the heroine of a movie about Mariupol. She also talked a lot about Mykyta in the movie, but she didn't give them any details. They are still in touch. Once she said: "Maybe you will be offended by me, but now Mykyta will be my adopted son." And Larysa was very happy about that, because now they both pray for him sincerely. Larysa was also contacted by one of the guys who was in the TRO and headed the security of the hospital in the city center. In a conversation with the soldier's mother, the defender said that in Mariupol, her son shared his food and medicine with the residents. Mykyta gave away almost everything he had.

❗In these pictures, he is 19 years old. At the age of 18, he voluntarily chose the path of the military, which even before the full-scale war, he was in the east part of Ukraine. Mykyta has been in captivity for almost 2 years, so he is now 21.

Please, share stories of our defenders in captivity. Many of them, including Mykyta have been there more than 2 years. You can only imagine what Russians do and tell them. Russians entertain themselves by breaking people, especially Ukrainians. They fiercely hate people who protect and fight for freedom. I hope our people find even more power in themselves to live through the hell of russian captivity. And when defenders all come back to their homeland, they will be themselves, in a healthy state like body and mind. There so many people are waiting for them. They deserve only good things after all of that.

The gorgeous Frank with important message in Kyiv.

[mariacallous]

Six months into the Russian occupation of the Ukrainian city of Kherson, in September 2022, the director of Liza Batsura’s college arrived at the dormitory where Batsura lived and told the students to pack up their things: They were going to Crimea. If the students refused, they would be put in the basement, Batsura said, speaking through a translator. The director gave no further explanation.

The next evening, they were taken to a camp called “Friendship” in Crimea, which was occupied by Russia in 2014. Although she couldn’t have known it at the time, Batsura—now 16 years old—was one of almost 20,000 children the Ukrainian government estimates have been deported or forcibly displaced to Russia. Only 388 have been returned.

Initially, the prospect of a couple of weeks by the sea didn’t sound so bad. But Batsura quickly began to realize that that wouldn’t be the case. The food was terrible, the days were long, and the children were pressured to sing Russian songs, including the national anthem, which made her very uncomfortable.

Foreign Policy is unable to independently verify Batsura’s account, but her experience closely tracks with the findings of investigations by the United Nations as well as researchers at Yale School of Public Health and other human rights groups who have documented a “systematic” effort to relocate and reeducate thousands of Ukrainian children over the course of the war. She also recounted her story to Reuters as part of an extensive investigation into the deportations.

Batsura was one of five Ukrainian teenagers who visited Washington last month with representatives of Save Ukraine, a Ukraine-based nonprofit that helps to rescue Ukrainian children from Russia and the territories it occupies. They stoically recounted the stories of their abductions again and again for journalists, members of Congress, and attendees at public events.

It was the group’s first visit to Washington. Batsura felt like she was in a movie, she said.

With long limbs and round cheeks, the teenagers filed into the conference room of a Washington-based nonprofit with their minders from Save Ukraine for an interview with Foreign Policy. Once the Wi-Fi password had been secured and the bathroom located, they began to tell their stories.

They were teenagers like any other you’d see hanging out with friends at a cafe or shopping mall. Yet they were also victims of Moscow’s large-scale deportation of Ukrainian children—a potential war crime and the reason that the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the country’s children’s rights commissioner, Maria Lvova-Belova, in March 2023.

Like Batsura, they all hail from regions of eastern Ukraine that were quickly occupied by Russian forces in the early days of the war. They recount being coerced or forced, sometimes at gunpoint, to go with Russian forces, and they were taken to schools and summer camps where they were held for several months and faced pressure to accept Russian citizenship.

In many instances, Ukraine’s most vulnerable children have borne the brunt of Russian deportation. Before the war, Ukraine had one of the highest rates of child institutionalization in Europe, with more than 100,000 children living in residential institutions. The vast majority have living parents but were placed in institutions because of poverty, difficult family circumstances, or because the child had a disability, according to Human Rights Watch.

The deportations have been carried out in plain sight. Early in the war, Putin signed a decree making it easier for Ukrainian children to be adopted and to be given Russian citizenship. Lvova-Belova herself claims to have adopted a teenager from the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol, and she has spoken publicly about her efforts to Russify him. In November, a BBC investigation found that a 2-year old girl who went missing from a children’s home in Kherson when she was just 10 months old had been adopted by 70-year-old member of the Russian parliament, Sergey Mironov.

Lvova-Belova has made a number of visits to institutions holding Ukrainian children, including to a college in the occupied Ukrainian city of Henichesk, where Batsura had been transferred from Crimea and placed in a culinary arts program.

The dormitory where Batsura was placed was freezing cold at night, she said, and the teenagers were forbidden to close the doors to their rooms. Russian troops patrolled the halls.

Lvova-Belova offered the children 100,000 rubles, roughly $1,000, and the opportunity to study at a college in Russia on the condition that they remain there. Batsura refused. Officials tried to find her a foster family, and she feared she would be sent to a remote region of Russia and would never be able to return to Ukraine.

For eight months while she was in Russian custody, Batsura had been unable to contact her mother, but she learned through a friend that her mother was working with Save Ukraine and applying for a passport so that she could travel to Russia and collect her.

With the border to Russia closed since the invasion, families face a daunting overland journey through wartime Ukraine, traveling into Poland, Belarus, and then Russia and—in Batsura’s case—down into occupied Ukrainian territory.

In some instances, children are turned over to their relatives without too much difficulty once the family members arrive to collect them, but the Russian authorities have also been known to present obstacles, said Olha Yerokhina, a spokesperson for Save Ukraine. The organization has helped families retrieve 240 children to date.

Officials at the school told Batsura that the journey was too arduous and that her friend was giving her false hope that her mother would ever arrive. “I didn’t believe them, and I kept telling myself that ‘No, my mom can do it, my mom will come,’” she said.

In May 2023, Batsura was rescued by her mother and now lives with her in Kyiv, where she is working with psychologists to process her experience. She is back in school and describes her hobbies as writing poems and making TikTok videos.

I asked her, given the atrocities that Putin has been accused of committing in Ukraine and during his presidency, how she felt about the fact that it was experiences like hers that had led the ICC to issue an arrest warrant for the Russian leader.

Yerokhina, who acted as our translator, interrupted to say that because she was rescued after the court order was issued, Batsura had likely missed the news about the ICC arrest warrant.

After Yerokhina explained the court’s decision, Batsura said, “It’s just.”

[metalobrukht]

A defender of Mariupol, who was recognized by his daughter at a mock trial a year ago, has died in russian captivity.

“It's been 9 days since you passed, 9 days, and you are still not on your native land. My beloved father, how we fought for you, how you fought and waited to meet us. You always encouraged us. I will never forgive those who didn't save you, and this happened in captivity.” — she wrote on July 30.

Before the full-scale invasion, Oleksandr worked as a sailor. He joined the territorial defense to defend Mariupol. He was captured in 2022. A year ago, the russians in Rostov-on-Don staged a mock trial.

Link

The UN and all sorts of international delegations are very concerned about the well-being of russian prisoners in Ukraine, but never check on Ukrainian POWs or respond to the evidence of brutal conditions and executions.

They weren't shaken by the leveling of the UNESCO heritage, nor by the returned bodies with no organs, nor by the mass kidnappings of children. Why would they mind the good old war crimes?

[littleshploinka]

Ten years ago the russian set foot in my country. The russian raped. The russian killed. The russian pillaged. The world kept on silently turning, ignorant of what Ukraine was going through. Peace of mind was higher on the list of priorities than peace.

But then the 24. February 2022 happened. And the world seemed to, for the first time, notice.

It's 26. February 2024 now. Two years and two days since.

Last year I was thankful for my comfort, yet this year I am revolted by the comfort those around me choose to bask in, consciously buying it with the lives of those they deem far enough away to be expendable.

It's been two years and still the russian rapes, kills, pillages, tortures, steals, defiles and rapes again and kills again. And the "war in Ukraine" is still somehow a controversial topic and the life of the Ukrainian mother, child, husband, uncle, grandmother, neighbour, friend, or classmate is but a statistic.

So I address this post to you, the comfortable one.

Look in the eyes of the pregnant woman raped to death by russian soldiers and tell her "you're a statistic".

Look in the eyes of the man shot by russian soldiers while on his way to feed his elderly mother and tell him "you're a number".

Look in the eyes of the child bringing canned food to their mother's grave after she was starved to death by russian soldiers sieging Mariupol and tell them "your mother is a number".

And to you compassionate ones:

Break the silence. Speak and scream and sing of russia's crimes and Ukraine's resistance,

Donate. A dollar, two, five, ten, twenty. Alone, with your family, with your friends. Buy a vest, helmet, a bandaid, a meal, a drone.

You can save a life.

I'll keep on doing just that. I will shout and donate and cry. And hope we can finally heal. Hope we can finally grieve.

Hope we can finally.

Fucking.

Rest.

Слава Україні 🇺🇦

[gryficowa]

Boycott!

Now that I have your attention:

[folklorespring]

There's a moment in "20 Days in Mariupol", where mother screams after her son couldn't be saved from a head wound. It's the most terrifying scream, I feel nauseous and have tears in my eyes only thinking about it. Fucking hell

[stele3]

Sorry if this isn't the place for this discussion, but why do you think people have such a hard time accepting the word of people who lived in Gaza outside of Hamas?

I saw the tweet that Ahmed shared ("Many others did not choose the path of Hamas"), and all I can think is that people are going to accuse Twitter of poorly translating the tweet to "play into the Zionists' hands", and all I can think is "Why would somebody potentially say that? What the hell is happening?"

I think it’s a combination of psyops — the social media narrative was too instantly one-sided not to have been coordinated by someone — and the desire to have a simple narrative of Good Guys vs Bad Guys. I’m sure there are individuals in Hamas who are fighting for freedom and to save Palestinian lives; but the organization itself and the majority of people who fight for Hamas are rapists and murderers.

Similarly, there are individuals in the Israeli government or even the IDF who want peace and hope to coexist with Palestinians. But Netanyahu and his cronies are perpetuating this genocide in order to protect themselves; the second Netanyahu is out of office, those corruption and abuse of power charges come right back to nail him.

Similarly, the people backing Hamas (Iran, Russia, China) and the people backing Israel (US, most of Western Europe) care very little for the actual people of Palestine or Israel. They’re more interested in the larger picture, ie control of trade routes through the Middle East/SWANA, particularly the Red Sea AND through Ukraine. The second Russia seized territory in Ukraine, they started building a railroad so they could connect a trade route through Ukraine to the rest of Europe, which would greatly benefit Iran and China.

That’s what all of this, from Ukraine to Palestine, is about.

[koichizeni-dunkminimi]

Today we were all shocked by the attack of the RUSSIANS on the city of Dnipro, but we should not forget about one more, for me, the most heinous crime of Russia - Olenivka

A year ago, on the night of July 28-29, the Russians committed one of the most brutal crimes committed by them during the 9-year war against Ukraine.

The enemy blew up the captured fighters of "Azov" in Olenivka.

A few days before the terrorist attack, the occupiers deliberately, knowing exactly what they were preparing to do, transferred some of the prisoners to a separate room. Around 02:00 on July 29, this hangar became a mass grave for the 53rd Azov soldiers in a second. 130 were injured.

They slept that July night. Unarmed. Waiting for exchanges that were promised and guaranteed by third countries and international organizations.

Having gone through bloody battles in Mariupol, carrying out the order and saving Ukraine, they were treacherously killed in their sleep.

Enemies failed to defeat them on the battlefield, even with absolute superiority in weapons and manpower. They took out their hatred, malice and powerlessness on people who could not defend themselves and fight back.

Today, Ukraine remembers everyone who died that terrible night. We always remember them. This memory lives in our every shot, in every volley, in every attack. And they live in them

[warningsine]

As Russian artillery rained down on the Ukrainian city of Kherson last year, one girl found a surprising way of processing the horror that was taking place. She passed the time in a bomb shelter playing the stark, many would say depressing, video game This War of Mine.

There is a critical burden for every Ukrainian this winter. For her, it is trying to make sense of a terrible conflict. For Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, it is getting the weapons and international support to fight Russia and keep strategic momentum on his country’s side. For his soldiers, it is trying to keep morale up and stay warm in freezing temperatures. And for the almost 8 million Ukrainian refugees that the war has created, it is trying to rebuild lives in foreign countries.

A disproportionate number are doing so in Poland, which has registered more than 1.4 million of them for temporary protection, the largest number of any EU country, according to ReliefWeb.

The country’s particularly strong solidarity is replicated across Eastern Europe. Warsaw resident Konrad Adamczewski puts it down to proximity: “This was a war that broke out in a neighbouring country. You could immediately see people coming to Poland for shelter.”

The company he works for, 11 bit studios, made the bestselling This War of Mine. The unnamed Ukrainian girl in the basement got in contact at some point last year to thank them for the help the game gave her.

11 bit studios has been showing its solidarity since the beginning of the war in other ways, too. Within hours of Russia’s campaign, the company launched a fundraiser. For a week, all proceeds from sales of This War of Mine would be donated to the Ukrainian Red Cross. Some $850,000 was raised, far exceeding what the company had expected. “The impact was huge. We were very happy we could contribute, but it was also hugely sad that in 2022 the message of the game was once again so vivid,” Mr Adamczewski told me.

It was a remarkable achievement financially. But, as Mr Adamczewski went on to say, it is only when you look at the content of the game itself that you realise quite how apt the campaign was on deeper levels. “We developed this as a game about peace. Immediately we saw people commenting online that the scenes of innocent people suffering unfolding on the news looked like This War of Mine.”

The game is, after all, entirely about war, but barely about soldiers. Instead, civilians are the protagonists in an unnamed conflict, as they try to survive and not lose hope in the process. Winning, if it can even be called that, is not triumph in battle, but just to survive until the end of the siege.

The setting is loosely based of the siege of Sarajevo, one of the longest in modern history, in which non-combatants were often forced into otherwise immoral acts to survive, be it hoarding resources, theft or even violence. But if the game had been released in 2022, Mariupol, Bakhmut or Kherson could well have been the inspiration.

Now the game is helping children outside Ukraine as well. At the end of 2022, it was officially included in Poland’s curriculum. Teacher Ilona Starosta says she uses it in her classes because of its many perspectives. “Students wonder what it means to win a game like this. Does winning mean surviving? Does it make sense to survive at all costs?”

These questions are not delivered in abstract debates. Players might be in the shoes of Adam, who struggles to get medicine for his ill child as he tries to untangle his own mind from severe shell shock. Or they might be journalist Malik, who has to balance the need to broadcast life-saving information with not angering a censorious military.

For Mr Adamczewski, the potential for explaining these dilemmas makes gaming a uniquely powerful tool for learning: “When children study literature, there is often a question of what the author had in mind. But in games, you become the author.”

The depth of the game has caught global attention. In the UK, London’s Imperial War Museum features it as an installation in its War Games exhibition, which opened in September. Curators placed it next to artefacts that captives made during the Second World War to create a sense of normality during extreme hardship; they include a teapot, given to an English prisoner of war by a Polish comrade, and improvised cigarettes. In the US, the game is featured in New York’s Museum of Modern Art’s exhibition Video Games and Other Interactive Design, which also opened in September.

However much renewed attention the game is getting globally, it remains a success firmly rooted in Poland. Like many other places in Eastern Europe, the country has a remarkably creative independent gaming sector.

As a developer, Mr Adamczewski says that the arrival of personal computers in the 1980s was a radical opportunity to learn more about life outside the communist bloc. More simply, people also wanted to use them to play games. With no access to ones developed in the West, people started developing their own. This wider wave of tech curiosity and the chance to start afresh after the fall of the Soviet Union are reasons that Eastern Europe has much better internet connectivity than richer western European countries.

But more than just a leading economic asset, the region’s gaming sector is becoming a cultural one, too. In the case of This War of Mine, to remind people that war has a terrible, complex impact on civilians. It is far too soon to say if a video game will ever reach the renown of All Quiet on the Western Front or Dulce et Decorum Est, classics that will explain history's worst moments for generations. But if one ever does, it could well come from Eastern Europe.

[panimoonchild]

Save people who protect us

20 Days In Mariupol depict the reality in which we have lived for over 10 years since the occupation of Crimea. The death toll of Ukrainians in Mariupol can be even higher without Azov. They're first one who stand against Russia to protect people of Mariupol.

Photo from Frank Wilde.

[mariacallous]

Viktoria Roshchyna, a Ukrainian journalist who died in Russian captivity, was held in Russian detention centers where torture is used against the prisoners, the Media Initiative for Human Rights said on Oct. 11.

Ukrainian officials confirmed Roshchyna's death on Oct. 10 but said that the circumstances of her death are still under investigation. The journalist disappeared in August 2023 while reporting in Russian-occupied territory, with Moscow admitting her detention the following year.

Previously, in March 2022, Roshchyna was detained for 10 days by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers while leaving Berdiansk in the direction of Mariupol. As a condition of her release, she was forced to record a video saying Russian forces had saved her life.

The Media Initiative for Human Rights, a Ukrainian NGO focused on human rights advocacy and investigations, said that Roshchyna was held in at least two prisons: the penal colony n. 77 in Berdiansk in occupied Ukraine and the detention center n. 2 in Russia's Taganrog.

Both these detention facilities are known for the use of torture against the captives. The NGO said it is aware of cases of prisoners being electrocuted in the Berdiansk prison.

The Taganrog detention center is "considered one of the most brutal detention centers in Russia," the initiative said, citing former prisoners. Many Azov Brigade fighters captured after the siege of Azovstal are held here.

"Viktoria was held in Taganrog at least from May to September 2024, in solitary confinement," the NGO's executive director, Tetiana Katrychenko, said on Facebook.

Roshchyna was taken out of Taganrog to an unknown location in September. According to Russia, she died on Sept. 19.

It currently remains unclear where she was being transported, whether she was being transported for an exchange, and whether her death was a result of torture and abuse by Russian captors, the NGO said.

Andrii Yusov, a spokesperson for Ukraine's military intelligence agency, told the Suspilne media outlet that Roshchyna was supposed to be included in an upcoming prisoner exchange.

Ukrainian prosecutors, who were previously investigating Roshchyna's disappearance, have now re-classified the case as a war crime and murder.

Roshchyna had covered Russia's full-scale invasion for multiple Ukrainian news outlets, including Hromadske, Ukrainska Pravda, and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).