Ukrainian civilians suffer death and injury as much as the military

Echo commentary published in the Orlando Sentinel by Trudy Rubin

As we celebrated our independence in July, the Ukrainians fought and died to keep theirs.

As we celebrated the Fourth of July with hot dogs and fireworks, mourners gathered at Kyiv’s famous St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral. They were paying last respects to one of Ukraine’s most noted young writers.

Viktoriya Yuryivna Amelina) (b. 1986 -d. July 1, 2023), later known as Victoria Amelina, was a Ukrainian novelist.
Victoria Amelina*, 37, was killed by a Russian missile strike on July 1 at a large, well-known pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. At the time, it was filled with journalists, humanitarian aid workers, local families, and probably some soldiers taking time out from the front lines. How like the Russians to bomb a pizza place.

I didn’t know Amelina, but have several Ukrainian friends who did, including one who was at her hospital bedside as she lay in an irreversible coma.

Ukrainians honor award-winning writer killed in Russian missile attack on restaurant - (Hawaii Tribune-Herald)

I’m writing about her, not to guilt-trip those who enjoyed their backyard barbecue this week, but because she inspired such admiration from her peers. She had paused her successful literary career to investigate and document war crimes in areas liberated by Ukrainian forces from Russian occupation.

We should look to Ukrainian heroes like Amelina for inspiration every time we get queasy about the possibility that a certain Putin-admirer might be re-elected in 2024. Her struggle to protect Ukrainian democracy was far more existential than ours, but she never gave up.

“Victoria Amelina's death was a profound shock to everyone in the literary community,” I was told on WhatsApp by Tetyana Ogarkova, a Ukrainian literary scholar and journalist. “Victoria was very loved, very modest, and independent. She could have stayed in Canada (where her father lived) but she chose to come back.”

Originally an IT specialist, Amelina could also have left Ukraine for lucrative work in Europe, but she stayed to battle the occupiers with the written word and with her investigations. 

Also, she joined up with the Ukrainian human rights organization Truth Hounds, which has worked for the past eight years to document human rights violations in Ukraine, and elsewhere in areas once controlled by Moscow.

Putin has already gotten away with the huge ecological war crime of blowing up the Nova Kakhovka Dam, also occupied by Russian troops. While there is no conclusive proof that Russia is to blame, the evidence overwhelmingly points to Moscow.

In order for war crimes cases to eventually be legally prosecuted, painstaking documentation is needed. In occupied areas, such as the dam, that evidence can’t be collected right now.

However, in liberated territory the work of documentation is endless. “With Viktoria’s work for Truth Hounds, she never stopped travelling,” Ogarkova recalled, even to places still under shelling. “She was very brave.”

In one famous case, when investigating the disappearance of her colleague, the celebrated children’s literature writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, Amelina travelled to his parents’ village to search for his diary. He had managed to bury it near a cherry tree before the Russians dragged him away. She and his father unearthed it. (Vakulenko’s buried remains were eventually found with two bullet holes).

Thanks to Amelina, the diary is now housed in the Kharkiv Literary Museum. His final entry ends, “Everything will be Ukraine! I believe in victory.”

“She died on July 1 which was his birthday,” Ogarkova told me. “This links two writers assassinated by the Russians.”

Yet even as Amelina investigated war crimes, she found time to write moving poetry about the war and also had plans to write a book about women at war writing about war.

She made a spontaneous trip to Kramatorsk to accompany three prominent Colombian writers and was dining with them when the missile cut her down. Twelve others died, including several young restaurant staff and twin 14-year-old girls out for pizza with their dad.

On the weekend before her death, Amelina read from her works at an international literary festival in Kyiv. Ogarkova’s husband played piano accompaniment in the background.

Some of her lines: “At night I looked at fireballs in the sky from my balcony in Kyiv and listened to explosions. I went to sleep without checking the news. The war is when you can no longer follow all news and cry about all neighbors who died instead of you a couple of miles away. till, I want to not forget to learn the names.”

Remember the name Victoria Amelina. It should inspire us all.

*This is from her poem "About A Crow," translated by Uilleam Blacker:

In a barren springtime field

Stands a woman dressed in black

Crying her sisters' names

Like a bird in the empty sky

She'll cry them all out of herself.

The one that flew away too soon

The one that had begged to die

The one that couldn't stop death

The one that has not stopped waiting

The one that has not stopped believing

The one that still grieves in silence

She'll cry them all into the ground

As though sowing the field with pain

And from pain and the names of women

Her new sisters will grow from the earth

And again will sing joyfully of life

But what about her, the crow?

She will stay in this field forever

Because only this cry of hers

Holds all those swallows in the air

Do you hear how she calls

Each one by her name?

"About A Crow." (Maine Writer- Certainly seems appropriate to learn how a group of crows is referred to as a "murder".)

The name of the writer is Victoria Amelina.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the The Philadelphia Inquirer.