Russia tortured a Ukrainian journalist to death — yet Trump wants to negotiate

The Ukrainian journalist Viktoria Roshchyna went missing in August 2023 while pursuing a story in Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia. She died in a Russian prison in September 2024. Her body was given to Ukraine in February 2025.

A forensic examination determined that she had been tortured and that several of her organs had been removed. She was 27 years old at the time of her death.

Roshchyn isn’t the only Ukrainian civilian to have been slaughtered by the Putin regime. Three years ago, in March 2022, just several weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, some 500 Ukrainians were tortured and executed in the town of Bucha, north of Kyiv. The mutilations and massacres — of both Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war — have continued unabated since then.

Needless to say, the bestial Putin regime is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide.

As tragic as Roshchyna’s death is, it’s also profoundly political. The Russian authorities could have kept her body or disposed of it some way. Instead, they decided to return it to Ukraine — not in 2024, but in 2025. The timing may be accidental: never underestimate the political incompetence of torturers.

Or it may be — in fact, probably is — intentional. After all, it is quite likely that Russian President Vladimir Putin knew of Roshchyna’s incarceration and deliberately returned her body to send President Trump a message.

Namely: Cajole, appease and threaten me as much as you like, but I won’t settle for anything less than Ukraine’s destruction.

Putin’s subsequent decision to drop bombs on civilians, and especially children, in Kryvyi Rih, Sumy and Kyiv — at precisely the time that the Kremlin is supposedly negotiating with the White House — reinforces the point. Like Roshchyna’s release, the bombings clearly state that Russia has no interest whatsoever in peace.

This is hardly surprising. Putin has invested his entire career and reputation in the war. Having suffered close to one million casualties, he can’t just settle for bits of four provinces, all the more so as Russia officially annexed them in 2022. To accept the status quo is to be humiliated as a loser. Putin’s got to have it all.

Which means that there can be, and will be, no peace as long as Putin remains in power. Only his departure, whether voluntary or not, will enable whoever succeeds him (possibly) to pursue an end to a war that is destroying Russia.

Do Trump and his minions understand that Putin is playing them by assuring them he wants peace, while at the same time implicating them in his crimes by telling them to their faces that he is a killer? That whatever overtures Trump, Secretary of State Mario Rubio, Vice President JD Vance or Steve Witkoff make amount to turning a blind eye to the slaughter of innocent human beings? The military historian Phillips O’Brien goes further and says that “Trump is helping Putin kill Ukrainians.”

In effect, Putin is challenging Trump to approve of Russia’s brutal violation of human rights and international norms. Since the administration has failed to endorse several United Nations resolutions condemning the Russian aggression, Putin has reason to believe that he can taint the White House and thereby relativize his guilt.

Thus far, Trump and friends have either fallen into Putin’s trap — Witkoff certainly has — or have welcomed Putin’s embrace of barbarity. The first implies that the White House consists of inexperienced amateurs who can’t tell that they’re being suckered. The second ascribes brutality and a lack of empathy to Trump et al.

Both versions are plausible, alas. And neither speaks highly of the White House’s moral standards or political acumen.

Trump could easily extricate himself from Putin’s bear hug by being at least as tough with him as he’s been with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Is the American president aware of the dilemma he confronts and how history will judge him if he makes the wrong choice and condones Roshchyna’s death?

The tragedy is that, although the answer is obvious, we don’t know.

Alexander J. Motyl is a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark. A specialist on Ukraine, Russia and the USSR, and on nationalism, revolutions, empires and theory, he is the author of 10 books of nonfiction, as well as “Imperial Ends: The Decay, Collapse, and Revival of Empires” and “Why Empires Reemerge: Imperial Collapse and Imperial Revival in Comparative Perspective.”