- Victoria Amelina died July 1 following a Russian missile strike in the city of Kramatorsk.
- Her forthcoming non-fiction novel documents the stories of female civil society leaders in Ukraine.
Victoria Amelina — an accomplished Ukrainian author who dedicated the last 17 months of her career to documenting war crimes — died on July 1 from injuries after a Russian missile hit the city of Kramatorsk, the BBC reported.
Amelina was dining in a restaurant with Colombian journalists and writers when the missile hit. She is the 13th person to have died in the strike as of July 3, while 60 others sustained injuries, according to the BBC. Amelina wrote two novels throughout her life and began writing poetry soon after the Russian war in Ukraine began.
—Victoria Amelina (@vamelina) June 24, 2023
Sergio Jaramillo, Colombia's former high commissioner for peace, told the Financial Times he was with Amelina when the missile struck.
"Victoria Amelina was an extraordinarily courageous woman, who put her successful writing career on hold to document war crimes, and ended up being the victim of a Russian war crime herself," Jaramillo said.
Amelina served as a war crimes researcher for Truth Hounds, an organization dedicated to documenting and investigating instances of "international crimes and human rights violations" in Ukraine, according to their website.
"I look like I should be taking pictures of books, art, and my little son," Amelina wrote on Twitter in June 2022. "But I document Russia's war crimes and listen to the sound of shelling, not poems."
—Victoria Amelina (@vamelina) June 7, 2022
Amelina's first non-fiction novel, "War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War," is set to be published in the near future. She received a grant in 2022 from Documenting Ukraine — a research project dedicated to documenting personal stories during the Russian war in Ukraine, according to their website — to complete the project. The work records the stories of female civil society leaders amid the war, according to Documenting Ukraine.
"Her clear and compelling ability to articulate the nature of the atrocities Russian aggression has inflicted on Ukraine made Victoria one of the strongest Ukrainian voices on the international stage," Documenting Ukraine wrote July 3.
Amelina also worked to preserve the voices of her fellow Ukrainian writers amid the war.
In September 2022, Amelina found the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko — a Ukrainian poet and children's writer abducted by Russian forces in March 2022 and killed soon after — in his garden, which he buried soon before his death, the Irish Times reports.
"I don't know if amazing is the right word but it was a great relief and a sense of great responsibility," Amelina told the Irish Times. "Because I realized I was holding something from him and I wanted to do with it what I would want for myself. And that's what I did. I passed it to the Kharkiv Literary Museum. That is what I'd want for my manuscript."