for women human rights defenders from war and conflict
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The Women Journalists from Ukraine and Russia, imprisoned by Russia for speaking truth to power
Today, Monday, 5th October 2026, RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in WAR) honours the courage of women journalists in detention in Russia and in territories under Russian occupation.
This year marks 20 years since the murder of Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006. She was killed for her outspoken criticism of Russia’s so-called “counter-terrorism operation” in Chechnya and the brutal treatment of and crimes committed against civilians there by Russian forces and the Moscow-backed Chechen authorities. Twenty years on, despite the ongoing investigations into her murder, those who ordered Anna’s killing have still not been brought to justice. Impunity continues.
For more than 12 years, Russia has waged war against Ukraine, while describing it as a “special military operation”. Like Anna, those in Russia, who speak truth to power and call the war a war, face persecution and imprisonment.
On announcing the winners of the 2026 Anna Politkovskaya Award, Belarusian writer and Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich, the 2018 Anna Politkovskaya Award winner and member of the 2026 Award Nominations Committee, said:
“The Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov wrote: “A cause is strong. When blood flows beneath it…”. Almost 200 years have passed; we are now living in the 21st century, and people ought to have learnt to talk to one another, yet we are still paying for freedom with the blood of the finest people of our time. The time will come when the world learns their names, and we will name all those we know today on both sides that drones are flying towards. Weapons change – drones have replaced tanks – but the only things that remain unchanged are the strength of the human spirit and the professional integrity of today’s journalists.
Even when they find themselves in the hands of their executioners, when they cannot write with a pen, they write their stories with their lives.
Read these stories. Remember their names.”
Among those who have been, or remain, imprisoned in Russia or in Ukraine’s territories under Russian occupation for their anti-war stance, their defence of human rights and their refusal to repeat government propaganda are a number of Ukrainian and Russian women journalists who refused to remain silent. One of them was the Ukrainian journalist Victoria Roshchina, who reported on the siege of Mariupol and the war crimes committed against the civilian population in the occupied Ukrainian territories. She was detained in August 2023 and died in September 2024 following torture and ill-treatment.
Another courageous Ukrainian journalist, imprisoned in Russia, the 64-year-old Irina Levchenko from the occupied Melitopol, testified in court on 9 September that she was detained in Melitopol in 2023 and held in the same unofficial detention facility with Victoria Roshchina. She testified that she was tied to an office chair with a plastic bag over her head and tortured with electric shocks. During her testimony in court she spoke of other women detainees who would be stripped of their clothes and tortured with electric shocks, with wires connected to their genitals, and beaten with a shovel by drunk FSB operatives. Irina Levchenko was kidnapped with her husband from a street in Melitopol in 2023 and was sentenced on 3 September 2026 to 15 years’ imprisonment on charges of ‘espionage’.
On learning about the winners of the 2026 Anna Politkovskaya Award, Tetyana Sokolova, a midwife from Mariupol and the 2022 Award winner, said:
“When war came to Mariupol, I saw death and destruction all around me. Yet in the basement of our maternity hospital, under bombardment and shelling, 27 babies were born. I was lucky to survive, and I have always felt that I must tell people what happened there, urging them to love and not to kill.
That is why the courage of these women journalists means so much to me. They too refused to remain silent. They continued to tell the truth about war, suffering and injustice, knowing the terrible risks they faced. Some have paid with their freedom, and Victoria Roshchina paid with her life. Their voices must not be silenced. We must continue to tell their stories, and the stories of all those whose suffering they tried to bring to the world.”
At present, at least four Ukrainian women journalists are believed to be held in Russian detention, but the real number could be much higher. The Russian authorities do not disclose information about the Ukrainian detainees’ whereabouts and keep them incommunicado, with no connection to their families, lawyers or outside world. They include Anastasia Hlukhovska, who is reportedly being held in the same prison in Kizel, Perm Region, where Victoria Roshchina died.
Iryna Danylovich, independent journalist from occupied Crimea who has been in Russian detention since April 2022, was tortured and subjected to inhumane detention conditions that have led to a serious deterioration of her health. She has been repeatedly denied access to medical care. Another Ukrainian detainee, Yana Suvorova, administered a local social media channel in Melitopol. She was sentenced in October 2025 to 14 years’ imprisonment for alleged crimes of “terrorism” and “espionage”.
Russian human rights defender Svetlana Gannushkina, the 2022 Anna Politkovskaya Award winner, commented on the decision to honour Ukrainian and Russian women journalists:
“The journalist profession has become one of the most dangerous today. This is hardly surprising; it has always been the case in times of war. The burden falls particularly heavily on women when men take up arms instead of pens. The award being presented today to Ukrainian and Russian women journalists cur-rently in prison once again unites the women of Ukraine and Russia.
They did not fight against each other; they were all fighting for peace. They were all doing their job as journalists. I would like to express the hope that peace will come soon, so that we may get together and recognise that their efforts to bring that day closer were not in vain.”
According to publicly available information, at least 11 Russian women journalists* are currently in detention, many because of their journalistic work and others on a range of charges, including sending money to Ukraine or for expressing their anti-war position. One of them is Daria Shipacheva, a medical and science journalist who was charged with “treason” for allegedly sending money to Ukraine where she has family. In July 2026 she was sentenced to 12 years’ following a trial that lasted less than two hours.
Another Russian journalist, Maria Ponomarenko from the Altai Region, was sentenced in January 2023 to six and a half years’ imprisonment and banned from working as a journalist for five years for a social media post about the bombing of the Mariupol theatre. She has since received several additional sentences for continuing to protest against the war while in prison and has made several attempts to take her own life.
The RAW in WAR Nominations Committee for the 2026 Anna Politkovskaya Award celebrates the courage and integrity of the Ukrainian and Russian women journalists, who have risked their freedom and even their lives to report about the war and speak out against human rights violations, war crimes and the escalating repression against journalists, human rights defenders and anti-war voices in Russia. The Russian government should immediately and unconditionally release all of them so that they could safely continue their work. As many of them have suffered torture, including sexual violence, in prison, all those responsible should be brought to account.
*Maria Ponomarenko, Olga Komleva, Antonina Favorskaya, Nika Novak, Vasilisa Shishkina, Daria Shipacheva, Alexandra Alexandrova, Alla Dongur-Ool, Kapitolina Averina, Natalya Lazaricheva and Elena Matushevskaya.
NOTES TO EDITORS
BACKGROUND
Wednesday, 7th October marks the 20th anniversary of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the campaigning Russian journalist and outspoken government critic, who exposed the brutal treatment of civilians in Chechnya, at the hands of both the Russian forces and the Moscow-supported Chechen officials.
To mark the anniversary of Anna Politkovskaya’s murder and to honour Anna, and other women like her in the world, RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in WAR) annually presents the Anna Politkovskaya Award to a woman human rights defender from a conflict zone in the world who, like Anna, stands up for the victims, often at great personal risk.
- RAW IN WAR
RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in WAR) is an international human rights NGO supporting women human rights defenders and women and girl victims of war and conflict around the world. RAW in WAR aims to:
- Support women human rights defenders, working in countries in war and conflict, and help end abuse and persecution against them.
- Work directly with women who are active in their communities in order to strengthen and enable their work on behalf of women and girl victims of conflict.
- Carry out its work in areas of conflict, or “forgotten conflict”, where there is limited, or no support from the major humanitarian agencies and organizations.
Mariana Katzarova founded RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in WAR) in 2006, after working as a journalist and human rights advocate in the war zones of Bosnia, Kosovo and Chechnya, including 10 years as the Russia Researcher for Amnesty International. Following the murder of her friend and colleague, Anna Politkovskaya, on 7th October 2006 in Moscow, Mariana and RAW set up the annual Anna Politkovskaya Award.
- AVAILABLE FOR INTERVIEWS (pictures on demand):
Svetlana Alexievich – Nobel Prize in literature laureate, 2018 Anna Politkovskaya Award winner (Belarus)
Svetlana Gannushkina – 2022 Anna Politkovskaya Award winner (Russia)
Elena Kudimova – Anna Politkovskaya’s sister
- SUPPORTERS
Since its founding, more than 100 influential cultural and political leaders have joined the Committee of Supporters for the RAW in WAR Anna Politkovskaya Award, including:
Nobel Women’s Initiative, Mairead Maguire (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate), Betty Williams (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate), Jody Williams (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate), Shirin Ebadi (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate), Rigoberta Menchú Tum (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate), Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate), Tatiana Yankelevich, Vaclav Havel, Jon Snow, John Pilger, Amy Goodman, Jeremy Bowen, Andre Glucksmann, Gloria Steinem, Sergey Kovalyov, Alexei Simonov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Svetlana Gannushkina, Lyudmila Alekseeva, Karinna Moskalenko, Lyse Doucet, Lindsey Hilsum, Gillian Slovo, Eva Hoffman, Adam Michnik, Oleg Panfilov, Tom Stoppard, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Natasha Kandic, Elisabeth Rehn, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Mariane Pearl, Azar Nafisi, Asma Jahangir, Carl Gershman, Hina Jilani, Susan Sarandon, Jane Birkin, Sophie Shihab, Naomi Klein, Sister Helen Prejean, Ariel Dorfman, Vanessa Redgrave, Eve Ensler, Michael Cunningham, John Sweeney, Jonathan Schell, Noam Chomsky, Marina Litvinenko, Lucy Ash, Sussan Deyhim, Heidi Bradner, Desmond O’Malley, Anne Nivat, Annabel Markova, Lord Frank Judd, Lord Nicolas Rea, Lord Anthony Giddens, Lord Nazir Ahmed, Baroness Molly Meacher, Baroness Vivien Stern, Baroness Helena Kennedy KC, Dame Evelyn Glennie, Yakin Erturk, Elena Kudimova, Andrey Nekrasov, Meglena Kuneva, Peter Gabriel, Stina Scott, Anna Stavitskaya, Dubravka Ugresic, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Victor Navasky, Holly Near, Joan Baez, Elizabeth Frank, Elizabeth Kostova, Bill Bowring, Irena Grudzinska Gross, Monica Ali, Isa Blyden, Nayereh Tohidi, Claire Bertschinger, Tsvetana Maneva, and others. For the full list of the Committee of Supporters to the Anna Politkovskaya Award please see: https://www.rawinwar.org/supporters/
FOR INTERVIEWS, PICTURESOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Friederike Behr on +49 (0) 1515 728 6247 WhatsApp/Signal or media@rawinwar.org
Elena Cook on +44 (0) 793 114 0817 WhatsApp/Signal or info@rawinwar.org
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