| Viktoriia Roshchyna, a 27-year-old Ukrainian journalist, set out to report on claims that Russia was operating a network of unofficial detention centers in occupied Ukraine. But in August 2023 she disappeared into one herself. For months, her whereabouts remained unknown. Then a body bag was delivered to Kyiv on a flatbed truck. The treatment of detained Ukrainian civilians is one of the most brutal and least examined parts of the war. The U.N. said Russia’s treatment of detainees is “disturbing and the scale is extreme.” Roshchyna wanted to expose this heavily camouflaged penal system, until her own disappearance and unexplained death became an emblem of Russia’s violation of the laws of war, officials, activists and lawyers said — with the prison at Taganrog, where she was detained for months, as Exhibit No. 1. The Post reconstructed the Taganrog complex based on the recollections of six former prisoners as part of a months-long investigation into Roshchyna’s death, and the network of prisons and ad hoc detention centers that stretches from occupied Ukraine to northern Russia. | 
