Looking at Women, Looking at War by Victoria Amelina review – in memory of the Ukrainian novelist who catalogued war crimes
A powerful, posthumous collection of diary entries, interviews, war reports and poetry has the late author’s tragic absence at its heart
When Russia attacked Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Victoria Amelina was a novelist and children’s writer, and the founder of a literary festival staged in New York, a town in the Donetsk region. But the invasion, of course, changed everything. What purpose did fiction have now, Amelina wondered? Wanting fervently to be useful, in the next weeks and months she worked in a humanitarian warehouse in Lviv, found vital medicines for those who needed them, and helped to evacuate both civilians and their pets from the most dangerous corners of the country. Most significantly of all, she volunteered as a war crimes researcher, training with a Kyiv-based NGO called Truth Hounds.
If such work was horrifying, it was also inspirational. Soon, she was thinking of a different kind of literary project: a book about the women who, like her, were taking huge risks to document the war. She would write this book in English, and in it she would deploy a purposeful jumble of interviews, diary entries, reports from field missions, Ukrainian history and even poetry. Such a book, she believed, wouldn’t only play its small part in holding the perpetrators accountable; one day, it would help to give “lasting peace a chance”. For a year, she worked on it, even as she performed all her other roles. On 27 June 2023, however, she was in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk in Donetsk when it was hit by a Russian missile. Sixty-four people were injured and 13 killed. Amelina died in hospital a few days later.
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