Lia Mills writes: Kyiv is so beautiful, Victoria Amelina reflects in her posthumously published Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary, it’s no wonder Putin wants it. She also said, in a Dublin café in April 2022, that if Putin were to get what he wants and Russia steals Ukraine, she and most of her friends would soon be in prison or dead.
Putin hasn’t yet got what he wants, although he looks perilously close to getting it, with the help of the current White House administration. Victoria is already dead. He might as well have launched the missile that killed her himself.
Many people in the anglophone world who have been paying attention to what has been happening in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 are aware of Victoria Amelina’s story: how Russia’s war changed her from emerging literary star to patriot-activist, a war crimes researcher and representative of her embattled country on several world stages – including Brussels, Westminster, Oslo, Dublin. She won friends and admirers for her country everywhere she went, in her distinctive long dark dresses and cardigans, with her blonde hair loose or lightly gathered, her far-seeing eyes, her easy laugh. She collected and shared stories about the realities of living through Russia’s aggression as the world looked on. Her public appearances drew appreciative crowds, moved people to tears. Her quieter meetings with diplomats, politicians and human rights campaigners were no less effective or impressive.
Victoria was in Egypt, on holiday with her son, on February 24th, 2022, when the full-scale invasion began. While the rest of the world watched thousands of people trying to get out of Ukraine, she was making her way back in. Having left her son in safety with relatives in another country, she worked, initially, as a volunteer helping displaced families. Soon she put her literary skills to use, training as a war crimes investigator and reporter with Truth Hounds. She decided to write a non-fiction record of the actions of other women who, like her, were devoting themselves to bearing witness to atrocity and devastation, doing their best to help their fellow citizens, hence the title of her book. It was unfinished when she was mortally wounded by a Russian missile strike on a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk on June 27th, 2023. She died five days later.
It’s no consolation to anyone who knew and loved her that Victoria also said, on that occasion in Dublin, that in returning to a war zone she wasn’t afraid of snipers or missiles; she’d be more afraid of Russian soldiers. Her book leaves no doubt as to why death from sudden wounds might be preferable to the depredations of soldiers let loose on civilian populations, their actions including extended periods of torture (rape, electric shock, beatings) of civilians seized at random; the castration of enemy combatants, extra-judicial killings, intimidation, starvation, and the bombing of hospitals, cultural institutions and landmarks – including those known to be sheltering children.
This list is drawn from Victoria Amelina’s own testimony. Cruelly, she was due to take up a residency in Paris to finish her book within days of her death. An editorial group consisting of her husband, friends and colleagues (Alex Amelin, Sasha Dovzhyk, Yaryna Grusha and Tetyana Teren) gathered her many drafts, notes and fragments together and compiled them into this published work, with meticulous, sensitive editing. Their respect for Victoria’s ideas led to the retention of some fragmentary notes, which offer tantalising evidence of two things: her wartime experience, and her writer’s instincts. Unfinished sentences suggest the inevitable disruptions of an air-raid warning or word of some fresh horror on her newsfeed: an atrocity, the disappearance of a friend, a bereavement. There are notes from her training as a war crimes investigator: what to do, how not to do it (don’t become a torturer yourself). There are sample reports. She records idea-phrases and impressions, place-marks her memory with names of people and cities which have become synonymous with atrocities (Mariupol, Bucha, Izyum). Leaving spaces to be written into later, springboards for reconstruction, the notes connect us to Victoria the writer. In her quest for truth and justice, she noticed and preserved beauty amid destruction.
Looking at Women Looking at War is many things. Thanks to painstaking editing, we are privy to Victoria’s own evolving idea of what it would be. Beginning as a personal diary, it developed into a record of the contributions made by Ukrainians (not only women) who, like her, were deflected by war into lives of service of one kind or another. People like Vira Kuryko, who takes the trouble to look after an elderly man whose animals have been killed in an act of random cruelty, leaving him with nothing to fill his days, nothing to live for; or Nobel prize-winner Oleksandra Matviichuk, a human rights activist who monitors and documents war crimes, or poet Volodymyr Vakulenko, whose diary Victoria herself would later find and save for posterity.
She came to see her book as a kind of detective story, in search of truth and justice (she is not kind to Russian propagandists who see themselves as journalists). She is on a mission to identify perpetrators and ensure accountability. Her subjects share a strong sense of citizenship, a deeply passionate commitment to the survival of their country, and extraordinary courage – with their author as well as with each other. It’s important to recognise that these pages are haunted by the writer Victoria would have become if she had lived. They are, unmistakably, a literary writer’s testimony. In one unforgettable scene, people board a train for Kyiv, at the risk of airstrikes, under cover of darkness ‘like fireflies, with cell phones glowing in their hands.’ On another occasion, during an air raid alert in Kharkiv, a group of war crimes researchers hurrying to their hotel wait for a green light to cross a road. ‘I bet we had a better chance of being hit by a missile than by a car. I also bet every one of us knew about these possibilities. Yet we followed the rules. And I was already writing this piece in my mind.’
In one heart-stopping exchange, a friend who has been raped by soldiers, confides that she can’t see a future. ‘I see it,’ Victoria tells her. ‘I see the future.’ While a reader catches their breath, the editors offer a consoling footnote: ‘This conversation led to the writing of a poem: “Word in the dictionary [future]”.’
Reading Victoria’s book generates wrinkles in time, as when she refers to Astrid Lindgren’s war diaries, widely read in Ukraine around the time of the full-scale invasion. Victoria envisages a time when people will read diaries of this war, as we now read hers – as she would have wanted. But how closely did she imagine this exact circumstance, that she would not be here to know that we are reading it? That she would not be the one to tour the festival circuit discussing it?
These pages are crowded with heroism, from small gestures (saving a stranded beetle) to large (civilians standing in front of Russian tanks); from startling acts of courage to stubborn persistence, like the search for the diary a dead colleague (Volodymyr Vakulenko) buried in his garden, guessing he was about to be lifted. Having found the diary herself, Victoria took phone-photos of every page, instantly sending each to a colleague for safe-keeping, ‘just in case’. Her motto: do everything now, this instant, in case it’s your last. Poignantly, receiving a special prize awarded posthumously to Volodymyr Vakulenko, she says: ‘I am speaking on behalf of my fellow Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko who, unlike me, did not survive another attempt of the Russian Empire to erase Ukrainian identity.’
In conversation with Philippe Sands at the Lviv Book forum (October 2022) – a full transcript of that brilliant conversation is included here – Victoria says that she can’t wait to be able to appreciate Russian literature and culture again, but that this can only happen ‘after Ukrainian territorial integrity is restored … after the Russian empire ceases to exist, (when) there are Russians, but no Russian empire.’
Anyone who knew her will hear her voice rising from these pages: calm in the presence of imminent danger, frankly admitting to fear when she feels it. When her writing took a detour through the work of war crimes investigation and public speaking, the demands on her time turned her to poetry. Twenty-first-century writer to her core, she wrote lines and drafts on her phone or laptop in airports and railway stations, between interviews. She crafted and wove her lines carefully, cleverly, later – in rare moments of solitude in the small hours, watching over her city from her nineteenth-storey balcony, dreaming of defending it.
We will never know what her book would have been if Russia had allowed her to live long enough to edit and finish it herself, during the residency she was due to begin in Paris with her son, within days of the missile strike that killed her. The cruelty of this timing is hard to think about. One of the most heartbreaking of all the personal admissions/revelations in this book is where she writes that she will have to learn how to be a mother to her son again. But, she writes, she’ll let him tell that story himself, ‘in the hope that our children and loved ones will understand, respect, and forgive our choices’.
The loss to Victoria Amelina’s country of a bright, committed citizen who would have been key to its reconstruction when this bloody war is over, is immense, as is the loss to world literature. The proofs of her talent are clear as she gives us not only a view on life and death in wartime Ukraine and the courage, loyalty and dedication of its citizens but also flashes of unforgettable imagery and a perspective that is uniquely her own. While we look at the many admirable figures depicted, recorded and remembered in her account of her war, while she ensures their place in Ukrainian history, the person we can’t look away from is Victoria herself. The voice we hear is hers. Irreplaceable. Unforgettable.
In their afterword, Victoria’s editors write: ‘Having taken Victoria away from us, from her family and friends, and from Ukrainian and world culture, Russia was not able to take away the power of her word. As she put it, “… whenever a writer is still being read, it means that they are still alive.”’
23/4/2025
Looking at Women Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary by Victoria Amelina, with a foreword by Margaret Atwood, is published by William Collins at £14.99.
