‘War erases stories: war criminals kill, then hide the evidence in hopes that the world will never learn even their victims’ names’

ByTelegraph Obituaries 4 July 2023 •

Victoria Amelina, who has died aged 37 of injuries sustained during a Russian missile attack on a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine, was an acclaimed Ukrainian novelist and poet who at the start of the 2022 Russian invasion retrained as a war crimes investigator.

Though she felt that the time was not right for fiction, in October 2022 she explained to The Guardian why, in times of war, storytellers are needed more than ever:

“War erases stories: war criminals kill, then hide the evidence in hopes that the world will never learn even their victims’ names. After liberating each town, Ukrainians work hard to recover the names of the dead, bury them with dignity, and tell the world their stories. Often we succeed, but not always.

“As I write this, on my way to Izyum [a city in the Kharkiv region], to document war crimes, the occupiers may well be destroying the evidence of genocide in Mariupol. Despite all our efforts, too many stories will never be known. As a human rights activist, I document war crimes and advocate for justice. Yet, as a writer, I know there are wounds only stories can heal.”

It was a conversation with an elderly man in Balakliya, a recently liberated town near Izyum, that had taken her to the city and led to the discovery of three Russian torture chambers and more than 75 victims. “There are real people here and their stories have to be told,” she explained.

Victoria Amelina was born in Lviv, western Ukraine, on New Year’s Day 1986. She emigrated to Canada with her family aged 14, but she soon decided to return to Lviv, where she attended the Polytechnic Institute, then worked as a computer programmer.

In 2014 she published her first novel, The November Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens, which was shortlisted for a Ukrainian literary prize. In 2017, her second novel, Dom’s Dream Kingdom, the story of three generations of the family of a Soviet pilot who had moved to Lviv before the collapse of the USSR, and their search for identity in a newly independent Ukraine, was shortlisted for the Unesco city of literature prize and the European Union prize for literature.

She also wrote two prize-winning children’s books, Someone or the Water Heart (2016) and The Eeeeeeeeevil Eka’s Excavator Stories (2021).

Even before the Russian invasion, Victoria Amelina was known as a human rights campaigner and travelled round Europe to highlight the plight of Oleg Sentsov, a Ukrainian film director from Crimea imprisoned by the Russians in 2015 on trumped-up charges of plotting terrorism. In 2019 he was released in a prisoner swap with Ukraine.

In 2021 she founded a literary festival in the small town of New York in the Bakhmut district of the Donetsk region.

At the start of the Russian invasion, Victoria Amelina joined Truth Hounds, a human rights organisation, and turned her pen to documenting Russian war crimes. She continued to write poetry, but admitted finding it difficult because, as she wrote in a poem entitled “No Poetry”, the new “war reality” was “devouring plot coherence”: “As if shells hit language/ the debris from language/ may look like poems/ But they are not/ This is no poetry too/ Poetry is in Kharkiv/ volunteering for the army.”

Victoria Amelina spent much of her time in the east of Ukraine – where, in Kapytolivka, a village near Izyum, she discovered the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, the Ukrainian children’s writer murdered by the Russian military in March last year.

Vakulenko had chosen to remain in Kapytolivka when it was occupied, and the day before he was abducted by Russian soldiers he buried his diary under a cherry tree in his parents’ garden. When the Kharkiv region was liberated, Amelina visited Vakulenko’s parents and dug up the diary, in which the writer had recorded details of Russian atrocities as they happened.

A few days before her death, Victoria Amelina took part in the presentation of the posthumous publication of Vakulenko’s work at a book festival in Kiev.

She herself had been working on War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, in which she told, in English, the stories of Ukrainian women working to collect evidence of Russian war crimes. It is expected to be published soon.

On the evening of June 27 Victoria Amelina was having dinner at the Ria Pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists collecting material for their movement “¡Aguanta Ucrania!” (“Hang On Ukraine!”), which seeks to build support for Ukraine in Latin America, where most governments have been reluctant to take a firm stance.

When the building was struck by a Russian Iskander missile at about 7pm, she sustained multiple skull fractures. She was rushed to hospital in Dnipro but died of her injuries. The Columbians all survived the attack.

Victoria Amelina is survived by her husband and a 12-year-old son.

Victoria Amelina, born January 1 1986, died July 1 2023