Russia is killing journalists and jailing them as “terrorists,” Ukraine tells UN

Russia is running a systemic campaign of disinformation, censorship, and persecution of journalists across the Ukrainian territories it occupies, Ukraine's first secretary at the UN, Dmytro Tymoshenko, told the UN General Assembly's Committee on Information, according to Ukrinform. He named individual captives by city, listed the toll of journalists killed since the full-scale invasion, and called on UN members to demand their release. Russia's targeting of Ukrainian reporters has continued since 2022, with one journalist's body returned showing signs of torture, and the country's broader civilian-detainee population estimated back in 2024 at 16,000 people held by Russian forces.The Russian war against Ukraine comes with a systemic campaign of disinformation, censorship, and violence against journalists and media workers, Tymoshenko said. Russian authorities try to erase the line between journalism and propaganda, calling their propagandists "journalists" while prosecuting real media workers as "terrorists," "extremists," and Ukrainian "saboteurs." Illegal detentions are dressed up as "counter-terrorism measures," but the actual goal is to suppress pro-Ukrainian sentiment and consolidate control over occupied territories.Tymoshenko named eight journalists illegally detained in temporarily occupied Melitopol: Yana Suvorova, Heorhii Levchenko, Vladyslav Hershon, Oleksandr Malyshev, Yevhen Ilchenko, Maksym Rupchov, Anastasiia Hlukhovska, and Iryna Levchenko. Some were kidnapped in August 2023 after covering life under occupation. They are now charged with "terrorism," "espionage," or "sabotage" — either still in illegal detention or already serving long prison terms after Russian court verdicts. The statement also addressed repression in temporarily occupied Crimea, where journalists Iryna Danylovych and Vilen Temerianov have been illegally detained since 2022 on fabricated terrorism charges. In 2024, Crimean Tatar journalists Rustem Osmanov and Aziz Azizov were illegally detained on similar fabricated charges of involvement in a terrorist organization. In Kherson Oblast, journalist and editor Hennadii Osmak was kidnapped and is being prosecuted on fabricated charges.