War in Ukraine: Writer Victoria Amelina brought back to life by her diary

On June 23, 2023, Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina sent a friend the file of the book she was working on. “Who knows what missile could hit me in Kherson, can you keep this document just in case?” she asked. She was preparing to go and collect the testimony of the widow of the conductor Yuriy Kerpatenko, killed by Russian forces 500 km south of Kiev.

Her precaution would prove tragically opportune: on July 1, Victoria Amelina succumbed to her injuries after a restaurant where she was sharing a pizza with Colombian writers was bombed. Not in the city of Kherson as she had imagined, but in Kramatorsk, in eastern Ukraine, where she had joined her colleagues from South America. She was 37, had an eleven-year-old son and the ambition to write "a book of reports about the people who document the war."

A War Diary in English

Less than two years later, her wish came true. In France, but also in the United Kingdom and the United States, the book that occupied her when she died is published this month: Watching Women Watch War (1), nearly 400 pages written in English as if to make them cross borders.

We meet Ievheniia Zakrevska, a renowned lawyer who put on military fatigues to join the front. Iryna Dovhan, a beautician tortured for five days by pro-Russian forces before being paraded as a trophy and then freed thanks to a photo published in the New York Times that moved the entire world. Or Casanova, a war crimes investigator for an NGO, who hides under this pseudonym as if to bring to life this "idyllic Ukrainian vision of a house surrounded by cherry trees, the casa nova" , where she had planned to settle before the war. So many women who became patriots in the face of Moscow's invasion that Victoria Amelina had interviewed during her investigations into Russian crimes.

A posthumous tribute

Like her "heroines" , the war transformed the rising star of Ukrainian literature. When it broke out, the writer had already written several novels, a children's book, created a literary festival and received several awards. But driven by a thirst for justice, she put down her novelist's pen on February 24, 2022 to collect evidence and testimonies on the atrocities committed in Ukraine. Her hope: to one day see their perpetrators appear before an international tribunal.

Unfinished but already rich, her work is recorded in this war diary that relatives, gathered in an "editorial committee", were keen to publish to revive it. As she herself had done in 2023 with the writer Volodymyr Vakoulenko. Before being captured and then shot dead by Russian forces, he had hidden his chronicle of the conflict under a cherry tree in his garden. A few months later, in the company of the deceased's father, Victoria Amelina had dug it up before giving it to the local library and having it published. A posthumous tribute that, two years later, would also be reserved for her.