When Yelyzaveta Shylyk, a teacher and recently-retired Ukrainian service member, was detained and questioned by Russian military forces in Luhansk, a city in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region, her interrogators threatened to send her to a Russian prison camp. “They said that if I failed, I would go to a place where I would regret being born,” Shylyk remembered.| Forbidden Stories
Ukrainian journalist Viktoriia Roshchyna was pronounced dead in Russian captivity in October 2024, after being secretly held for months in Russian-occupied Ukraine and a Russian prison. In February 2025, her body was repatriated. Forbidden Stories investigated her detention and death, which came on the heels of a reporting trip to Zaporizhzhia, aimed at telling the stories of Ukrainian civilians unlawfully held by Russia.| Forbidden Stories
Since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, thousands of Ukrainian civilians in the occupied territories have vanished into thin air. These “ghost prisoners” are whisked away by the occupying forces to informal places of detention, where they’re held outside any legal framework and tortured. Some are then transferred to the Russian prison system, where they languish without charges or serve trumped-up sentences. Forbidden Stories and its partners unveil this opaque system design...| Forbidden Stories
Her investigation into the thousands of Ukrainian civilians illegally detained by Russia cost her her life. 45 journalists continued her work.| Forbidden Stories