A Ukrainian digital broadcaster has said that one of its reporters in the country’s southeast has gone missing and is believed to be being held by Russian forces.
Hromadske TV reported that reporter Viktoriya Roshchina last heard about it on March 12, the day after the story was published from the Russian-occupied city of Energodar.
Ukrainian Human Rights Ombudsman Lyudmila Denisova said on Saturday that the government believes she was abducted by Russian forces in the city of Berdyansk, which is on the Black Sea coast and is also under Russian occupation.
Hromadske is a small broadcasting station that began operating in 2013 and is linked to the Maidan protests in Kyiv that began that year.
Roshchyna’s disappearance comes amid reports that other activists and officials are being held against their will in other parts of Russian-occupied Ukraine.
According to the mayor of the Kherson region, a high-ranking official of the city council of Novaya Kakhovka was kidnapped three days ago. The wife of Dmitry Vasiliev said on her Facebook page that her husband was detained because of his negative attitude towards Russia.
Ukrainian officials have said Russia wants to create a Kherson People’s Republic in the style of the pro-Russian states created around Donetsk and Luhansk in 2014, and are demanding local advisers back the move.
More: Elsewhere in Ukraine, Melitopol Mayor Ivan Fedorov was released from custody by Russian troops as part of a prisoner exchange, the Ukrainian Center for Strategic Communications and Information Security said in a statement Thursday. After the arrest, Fyodorov was taken to Lugansk and held there for five days.
Viktor Tereshchenko, mayor of the village of Velykoburlutska in the Kharkiv region in northeastern Ukraine, has also been released, Oleg Sinegubov, head of the Kharkiv regional state administration, said in a video message on Friday. Sinegubov said on Thursday that Tereshchenko had been “captured” by Russian troops.
And on Sunday, Yevgeny Matveyev, the leader of Dniprorudny, a small town north of Melitopol, was kidnapped by Russian troops, according to Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. CNN was unable to independently confirm this claim.
According to the human rights organization ZMINA, about 17 people have been detained by Russian troops in Ukraine since the beginning of the war.