“Looking at women who look at war”: the passion of the writer Victoria Amelina, who died in Kramatorsk after six days in a coma

I was greatly impressed by the youth, energy and intelligence of Victoria Amelina whom I met in October 2022 during a few intense days that I spent at the Lviv Bookforum, the largest book fair in Ukraine.

From the Hay Festival we had decided to support this festival digitally by connecting Ukrainian writers with writers from all over the world, and to audiences everywhere in digital form.

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But several international war authors and journalists, knowledgeable about the region, decided to go to Lviv in person to meet their Ukrainian counterpartsthus giving another dimension to the festival.

DANIEL MORDZINSKI / HAY FESTIVAL.

They were days of intense conversations, of creating friendships that are forged faster than ever due to the context and the need. From there also came great projects.

There we met, among others, Victoria Amelina, Diana Berg, Volodymyr Yermolenko or Nataliya Gumenyuk, with Jon Lee Anderson, Misha Glenny, the British journalists Emma Graham Harrison and Charlotte Higgins, the latter since then decided to learn Ukrainian and report on cultural issues in the region. .

Also with neurosurgeon Henry Marsh and doctor Rachel Clarke, who as a result of this visit created the NGO ‘Hospice Ukraine’ dedicated to supporting health professionals in that country to provide dignity and palliative care to all those in need while end of life

Victoria participated in a discussion about women and war together with Janine de Giovanni and Lydia Cacho.

I remember your words.

I was hoping that Ukraine would win this war, because Ukraine, unlike Russia, is a liberal democracy and among other things this meant that women played a crucial role in society.

According to her, this was one of the decisive factors for victory.

Victoria Amelina was one of the most famous young writers in Ukraine. (GETTY IMAGES).

He then told us about her book in progress, “War Injustices Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War”. The first profile was of Yevgenia Zakrevska who was and still is a lawyer who fought for justice for the victims murdered during the Dignity Revolution in 2014.

At another table, with the lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, he commented that it was essential to create international tribunals for the crime of aggression and that Russian leaders be punished for this war.

For that, he tirelessly documented all these war crimes, for the future of his country.

I saw her again at our Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias in January of this year, where we invited her to talk about her work and activism. together with the writer Andrei Kurkov and Oleksandra Matviichuk -director of Civil Liberties, the organization that won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize-, with whom Victoria also collaborated.

One of those nights, on the walls of Cartagena, she, Sofia Cheliak -the programming director of the LvivBookforum-, and I talked about how to re-establish festivals of literature and ideas in a future Ukraine.

Mariana Savka (left), a Ukrainian writer, with Victoria Amelina during the Lviv Book Forum last October. (GETTY IMAGES).

Victoria had created the New York Literature Festival a few years ago, which took place in a town called New York in the Bakhmut area, in Ukraine..

A month later, he sent me via WhatsApp a photo of the festival venue totally destroyed by Russian attacks with a message that said “I know you will understand better than anyone how I feel today.”

During a dinner coinciding with the London Book Fair we made plans to promote his recent publication in Spanish of “Un hogar para Dom” at a Hispanic festival.

We also talked at length about her work as a field investigator of Russia’s war crimes in the liberated territories of eastern, southern and northern Ukraine, including Kapitolivka, near Izium.

There he found the diary of the writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, murdered by the Russians, managed to get it published and was another document of Russian war crimes.

On June 27, 2023, Russia committed another war crime by sending a high-precision Iskander missile into the Ria Lounge restaurant in Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine.

Her colleagues at Truth Hounds, an NGO that documents war crimes, with whom she had worked so extensively, interviewed eyewitnesses to the attack. They stated that there were no military objects that could have been a legal target for attack that day.

They also confirmed that it was an ordinary day in one of the most popular restaurants in the city: up to 40 people dined, divided into small groups. Truth Hounds investigators identified that the foreigners, whom Russian propaganda called mercenaries, were actually volunteers and journalists.

Among them were former Colombian peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo, who launched the support campaign from Latin America, Aguanta Ukraine, Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince and journalist Catalina Gómez, who has been covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine since its inception for France 24 and accompanied the seriously injured Victoria Amelina in an evacuation ambulance to the hospital.

Victoria ended up being part of one of the war crimes that she tirelessly documented.

She was beautiful inside and out, but she carried it very lightly.

It is up to us for her to continue documenting, to continue denouncing to make Ukraine a country where authors and the general public can meet without fear to imagine other possible worlds in a festival like hers, the one in New York, but in that New York from the Bakhmut area in Ukraine.

Victoria Amelina, rest in peace.

Cristina Fuentes La Roche

Hay Festival Coordinator

Source: Elcomercio