The Anna Politkovskaya Award has this year been given to 11 Russian and five Ukrainian female journalists who are imprisoned in Russia and in the occupied territories of Ukraine.

According to the award’s founder, the international organisation RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in WAR), the nominations committee praised the “courage and integrity” of the laureates, who “risk their freedom and even their lives to report on the war and speak out against human rights violations, war crimes and the escalating repression of journalists, human rights defenders and anti-war activists in Russia”.

The Ukrainian recipients are Viktoriia Roshchyna, Iryna Levchenko, Anastasiia Hlukhovska, Iryna Danylovych and Yana Suvorova. Roshchyna received the award posthumously.

Roshchyna reported on the siege of Mariupol and events in territories occupied by Russia. She was detained in August 2023. Her death became known in September 2024. Ukrainian authorities said Roshchyna had been subjected to torture and ill-treatment.

Iryna Levchenko, 64, is from Mariupol. She and her husband were abducted in Melitopol in 2023. According to RAW in WAR, Levchenko was restrained, beaten with a shovel and subjected to electric shocks in detention, including to intimate parts of her body. In September 2026, she was sentenced to 15 years in a penal colony on espionage charges.

The Russian recipients are Daria Shipacheva, Maria Ponomarenko, Olga Komleva, Antonina Favorskaya, Nika Novak, Vasilisa Shishkina, Aleksandra Aleksandrova, Alla Dongur-Ool, Kapitolina Averina, Natalia Lazaricheva and Elena Matushevskaya.

Daria Shipacheva is a medical and science journalist. She was sentenced to 12 years in a penal colony on charges of treason. The case was linked to money transfers to relatives in Ukraine.

Maria Ponomarenko, a journalist from Russia’s Altai Krai, received a lengthy prison sentence after posting on social media about the bombing of the Mariupol Drama Theatre. She continues to speak out against the war while in prison. Ponomarenko has made several suicide attempts.

Writer and Nobel Prize laureate Svetlana Alexievich, who herself received the Anna Politkovskaya Award in 2018, said with sorrow:

“The Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov wrote: ‘A cause is powerful when blood flows for it…’ Almost 200 years have passed; we are already living in the 21st century, and people should have learned to talk to one another. Yet we continue to pay for freedom with the blood of the best people of our time. The time will come when the world learns their names, and we will name all those whom we know today — on both sides, towards which drones are flying.

Weapons are changing — 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,” the writer said.

“Even when they fall into the hands of their torturers, when they cannot write with a pen, they write their stories with their own lives. Read these stories. Remember their names,” Alexievich urged.

RAW in WAR called on the Russian authorities to immediately and unconditionally release all female journalists held in detention. The organisers also called for those responsible for torture and sexualised violence against prisoners to be held accountable.

The press release notes that “this year marks 20 years since the killing of Anna Politkovskaya in October 2006”. The organisation recalls that “she was killed for her outspoken condemnation of the so-called Russian ‘counter-terrorist operation’ in Chechnya, as well as the brutal treatment of civilians and crimes against them committed by Russian military personnel and Moscow-backed Chechen authorities. Twenty years later, despite the ongoing investigation into Anna’s murder, those who ordered her killing have still not been held accountable. Impunity continues,” the award’s organisers said.

Russia, the press release states, has been waging war against Ukraine for more than 12 years, calling it a “special military operation”. People in Russia “who tell the authorities the truth and call the war a war, as Politkovskaya once did, face persecution and imprisonment”.

The Anna Politkovskaya Award was established by RAW in WAR in 2007. Each year, the organisation presents it in memory of the Novaya Gazeta journalist, announcing the recipients around the anniversary of her killing on 7 October 2006.