The International Press Institute (IPI) and the International Media Subsystem (IMS) posthumously awarded Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchina the World Press Freedom Hero 2025 Award.. She was brutally tortured and died in Russian captivity after she was illegally detained while carrying out an editorial assignment in territories occupied by Russian troops..

" She believed that she should be the one to show the world the stories of people killed and tortured by the Russians. Her work ended in tragedy, and now we must tell Victoria’s story to the world,” says the director and editor of Slidstvo. Info"

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The award ceremony will take place on October 24 in Vienna during the IPI World Congress, dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the organization.. In addition to Roshchina, this year the title of “Hero of Press Freedom” was given to:.

Mzia Amaglobeli, Georgia - co-founder and general director of the opposition media resources Batumelebi and Netgazeti. In August 2025, she received a sentence of two years in prison.;

Martin Baron, USA - former editor of the famous American publications The Washington Post and The Boston Globe;

Mariam Abu Dagga, Palestine, (posthumously) - freelance photojournalist who died on August 25, 2025 as a result of Israeli shelling in the southern Gaza Strip;

Gustavo Gorriti, Peru - founder and editor-in-chief of the Peruvian investigative journalism publication IDL-Reporteros;

Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong - publisher and founder of the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily. Since 2021, repeatedly prosecuted on various charges.

Tesfalem Valdiez, Ethiopia - co-founder and editor-in-chief of Ethiopia Insider. He was arrested several times and forced to work in exile.

Victoria Roshchina is a freelance Ukrainian reporter who has been covering events at the front and in the occupied regions since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion.. The first detention of the journalist took place on March 16, 2022 in occupied Berdyansk. She was held by representatives of the FSB of the Russian Federation. The Russian military released Roshchina on March 22, 2022, forcing her to record a video in which she stated that she had no complaints against the Russian special services.

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In the summer of 2023, she went on a new mission to document war crimes by Russian troops. After that, contact with her disappeared.

It subsequently became known that the journalist was detained by Russian authorities. She was held in various prisons in the Russian Federation for more than a year.. Her death was reported on October 10, 2024. The official date of death of Roshchina is September 19, 2024. She died in pre-trial detention center No. 3 in the city of Kizel, Perm Territory..

GUR representative Andrey Yusov noted that Roshchina was on the list for exchange.

After confirmation of death, the criminal proceedings in the case of her disappearance were reclassified as a war crime connected with premeditated murder. The Russian military did not return the body of the journalist to Ukraine during several exchanges; it was returned only on April 24, 2025. The head of the War Department of the Prosecutor General's office, Yuri Belousov, said that the body had numerous signs of torture, ill-treatment, the brain, eyeballs and part of the trachea were missing.