07 August 23
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Victoria Amelina was a gifted novelist who put fiction aside to devote herself to documenting the atrocities of Putin’s war.
Just about half an hour later, as their food was being served, a medium-range Russian Iskander cruise missile hit the concrete roof of the restaurant and exploded. People screamed in pain and confusion; many were trapped under the roof, which had collapsed. At least sixty-one people were injured and thirteen died in the strike, among them several children, including fourteen-year-old twin sisters. Speaking on Russian television afterward, the head of the Duma Defense Committee, Colonel General Andrey Kartapolov, was exultant, saying, “The strike on Kramatorsk was a real beauty. I bow my head to those who planned it. Not a blow but a song. My old military heart rejoices.” It was, in fact, the second mass civilian atrocity caused by Russian forces in Kramatorsk since the invasion of Ukraine began. On the morning of April 8, 2022, a pair of Russian Tochka-U missiles hit the city’s main railway station, which was packed with more than a thousand people waiting for a train to evacuate the city; at least fifty-eight were killed, including seven children, and more than a hundred and fifty were injured. On that occasion, the Russian Defense Ministry first claimed the attack was a Ukrainian hoax, then insisted that the Ukrainians had carried it out themselves.
In the latest missile strike, three of my friends, all of them Colombians, escaped without major injuries. Héctor Abad, a writer from Medellín, was unhurt, as was Catalina Gómez Ángel, a longtime war correspondent who now spends much of her time in Ukraine. Sergio Jaramillo, a former senior government official and a lead negotiator during the peace talks with the FARC guerrillas, had a few cuts and bruises. But the fourth, Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian novelist and poet, suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She was taken to a local hospital and then, a couple of days later, to a better-equipped medical facility in the city of Dnipro. She did not regain consciousness, however, and was put on a life-support system. On the night of July 1st, we learned that she had died.
Victoria, who was originally from the western city of Lviv, was thirty-seven and had been living with her husband, an I.T. specialist, in Kyiv. They had a twelve-year-old son who, for safety, was living with her mother in Krakow. Victoria was a gifted writer, the author of two novels and a children’s book. Her second novel had been short-listed for the European Union Prize for Literature, in 2019, and she’d received the Joseph Conrad Literary Award, in 2021, but since the Russian invasion she had stopped writing fiction to devote herself to the war effort. She joined the efforts of PEN Ukraine, and received training from Truth Hounds, a war-crimes investigation group based in Kyiv that sent teams to document abuses in towns and villages that had been occupied by Russians.
She had already made an extraordinary discovery. Last September, Victoria took a trip to the city of Izyum, in northeastern Ukraine, following the Russian retreat from the area. There, she looked into the disappearance of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian poet and children’s-book author whom she knew. He had not been seen since Russian soldiers detained him in Kapytolivka, his home village, on Izyum’s outskirts, in March of 2022, and he was presumed dead, but little else was known. Victoria went to Kapytolivka, where Vakulenko’s father told her that his son had kept a diary of the occupation, which he had buried under a stand of cherry trees in the garden, evidently shortly before he was taken away. She managed to dig up the notebook, in which he described encounters with Russian soldiers—one of whom said that their mission was to build a “different Ukraine”—and the growing effects of hunger, from surviving mostly on potatoes from the garden. Later, his body was found in a mass grave in a forest outside the city, with those of more than four hundred other people, including nearly two hundred women. Many of the bodies bore evidence of torture. Vakulenko had been killed with two bullets from a Makarov pistol.
Even before the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine occurred, in February, 2022, Victoria was keenly aware of the fragility of her country and its culture, and sought to do something about it. In 2021, using some of her Joseph Conrad Award prize money, she organized a literary festival, in her husband’s birthplace in Donetsk—a village named New York. (The origin of the name is unknown, but it dates back to the nineteenth century. In 1951, during the Cold War, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet changed it to Novhorodske, or “New City.” In July, 2021, Ukraine’s parliament voted to change it back.) For Victoria, choosing New York—a cultural backwater—for the festival was an act of intentional irony, but it was also political. She wanted to bring some respite to the front lines of the region, which had been under assault by Russian-backed paramilitary separatists since 2014—in a conflict that was largely ignored by the outside world but had smoldered ever since Vladimir Putin’s occupation and annexation of Crimea—and in which more than fourteen thousand people had died.
Victoria posted images of the first and only New York Literary Festival, in October, 2021, which was attended by writers from Lviv and Kyiv, many of whom had never been to the region before. In one photograph, people are milling around the courtyard of a small neoclassical building where the festival was housed. In another, taken more recently, after a missile attack, the same building is shown with its roof blown off. There is rubble in the courtyard, and it is empty of people.
Last year, Victoria won a “Documenting Ukraine” grant, from the Institute for Human Sciences, in Vienna. A few weeks before her death, she learned that she had been awarded a residential fellowship at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination, which provides for scholars, writers, and artists to spend a year in Paris. She was excited at the prospect of a war-free interlude in the French capital with her husband and their son—however long the war was to last, they would at least spend the coming year together in relative peace. She also intended to use the time to complete a book about efforts that she and other Ukrainian women were undertaking to uncover Russia’s war crimes in their country, entitled “War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War.”
I first met Victoria last October, at the annual Lviv BookForum. Some of the writers who participated, including Victoria and me, went on to Kyiv, and she showed me around the capital. We visited a playground in a pretty park that had a statue of the nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet and national hero Taras Shevchenko at its center. The previous day, a Russian missile had struck the playground—fortunately, no children had been present. Victoria’s apartment was not far away; she told me that the park was her “favorite place in Kyiv.”
We met again this year, in January, at a literary event, the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia. She was recovering from a bout of pneumonia that she had contracted on a trip to the recently liberated city of Kherson, but she attended along with other Ukrainians, including the novelist Andrey Kurkov; the human-rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk, whose Center for Civil Liberties was the co-recipient of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize; and Victoria’s close friend Sofia Cheliak, the young curator of the Lviv BookForum. It was in Cartagena that Victoria met Sergio Jaramillo, who was launching a consciousness-raising campaign called Aguanta Ucrania—or “Resist, Ukraine!”—by enlisting Latin American writers and intellectuals to denounce the invasion. (In Latin America, as in much of Africa and other parts of the Global South, there is widespread incomprehension about the war, and many on the left parrot the official Moscow line while lauding Putin’s regime as the moral inheritor of the Soviet government’s efforts to train, arm, and finance the national liberation movements that fought Western-backed governments in the nineteen-sixties and seventies.)
Catalina Gómez Ángel was also in Cartagena and met Victoria there. Last April, they met again, in Ukraine, and travelled to New York (the one in Donetsk). Victoria had not been back to the village since the invasion began, and she wanted to see it before she left for Paris. “She was saying goodbye,” Catalina said. “She felt guilty about leaving her country in wartime, but was also aware that she needed to spend time with her son.” In June, both women were at the Book Arsenal literary festival, in Kyiv, where Victoria presented a newly published volume of Volodymyr Vakulenko’s diary and his war poetry. In the book’s foreword, she had written, “As long as a writer is read, he’s alive.” Sergio and Héctor Abad were at the festival, too, and the four of them took part in a talk about Aguanta Ucrania. Sergio wanted to visit some of the frontline towns, and invited Héctor to join him. Catalina, who knows the terrain—and had a trusted driver and S.U.V.—offered to take them. At the last minute, Victoria decided to go, too.
Catalina had been particularly struck by Victoria’s caustic wit. She noted that she was “being deluged by invitations from around the world to come and speak about Ukraine, but only after Ukraine’s victory,” Catalina told me, adding, “But she said she wondered what victory would feel like, after so many deaths.”
Victoria’s moral clarity, determination, and love of country impressed me greatly. She now joins the ranks of those whose lives have been cut short by war, their truncated careers the source of what-if musings forever afterward. In Victoria’s case, I feel certain that her legacy, and her words, will endure, infusing a contemporary, combustive element to the Ukrainians’ growing sense of identity and nationhood. Her funeral was held on July 5th, at a cathedral in Lviv. That night, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in the city, killing ten civilians and wounding dozens more. Human Rights Watch called the strike “a possible war crime.”
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