Ukrainian writer dies after Russian missile attack on restaurant

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An acclaimed Ukrainian novelist and poet who began documenting Russian war crimes after Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion has succumbed to injuries she sustained in a Russian missile attack on a crowded restaurant last week.

Victoria Amelina, 37, died on Saturday after suffering a severe head injury when a high-precision Russian Iskander missile struck Ria Pizza in the eastern city of Kramatorsk, trapping people under the building’s rubble.

With her passing over the weekend, the death toll from the attack rose to 13 people, including twin 14-year-old sisters, according to Ukrainian authorities. At least 60 other people were wounded in the attack.

“With our greatest pain, we inform you that Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina passed away on July 1 in Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro,” PEN Ukraine and the war crimes research group Truth Hounds said in a statement released on Sunday.

Amelina was the author of two novels, including the award-winning Dom’s Dream Kingdom, and a children’s book. In 2021, she received the Joseph Conrad-Korzeniowski literature prize. The same year, she founded the New York Literature Festival in the eastern Ukrainian town of New York, near Bakhmut.

She had been dining at Ria Pizza together with a delegation of Colombian writers and journalists when the missile struck.

“They clearly knew that they were shelling a place with many civilians inside,” PEN Ukraine said of Russian forces.

Ukraine’s domestic intelligence service, the SBU, said it had arrested a local man who allegedly helped co-ordinate the strike and sent video footage of the pizzeria to the Russian military.

Once a city of 150,000 residents, Kramatorsk has seen its population drop by about half since the Russian invasion began. Roughly 25km from the frontline, it is a crucial hub for humanitarian assistance and military logistics, making it a key target of Russian attacks. A Russian missile strike on the city’s train station in April last year killed 63 civilians.

Many of Kramatorsk’s businesses, including hotels and restaurants, have closed since the fighting intensified. Ria Pizza was one of the few eateries that remained open.

Amelina was dining at the restaurant with journalist Catalina Gómez, the writer Héctor Abad Faciolince and Colombia’s former high commissioner for peace Sergio Jaramillo, who had come to Ukraine as part of a campaign to underscore Latin America’s solidarity with the country. 

“I was sitting right next to Victoria. We had just finished a day in the field, talking to people about the Russian invasion. As the food was brought to us, I bent down to pick up a napkin and, at that moment, the missile struck,” Jaramillo told the Financial Times.

“Victoria, who had been sitting upright, was badly hit at the back of the neck,” he added. “But I was OK. Then the whole room fell to pieces and time stopped. I stayed with her and called an ambulance and paramedics.”

Rescuers took Amelina to a local hospital before she was transferred to a trauma ward in Dnipro, a larger city further west of the frontline.

“In the last days of Victoria’s life, her closest people and friends were with her,” the PEN Ukraine statement said.

Since Russia’s invasion in February of last year, Amelina had worked with Truth Hounds to document Russian war crimes, criss-crossing the country and visiting the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine.

It’s me in this picture.
I’m a Ukrainian writer. I have portraits of great Ukrainian poets on my bag. I look like I should be taking pictures of books, art, and my little son. But I document Russia’s war crimes and listen to the sound of shelling, not poems. Why? #StopRussiaNow pic.twitter.com/R50RqacXSZ

— Victoria Amelina 🇺🇦 (@vamelina) June 7, 2022

Friends and other authors paid tribute to Amelina following the news of her death, sharing videos of her reciting poetry and photographs of her working in the field to document Russian atrocities.

“Victoria Amelina has been among the most powerful voices telling international audiences about Ukraine’s literature and Russia’s war crimes,” said the Ukrainian Institute in London.

Amelina was set to begin a year-long writer’s residency in Paris this month. She was also compiling stories of women enduring the conflict and researching war crimes for a book titled War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War.

Born in the western city of Lviv on New Year’s Day in 1986, Amelina spent part of her childhood in Canada with her father before returning to Ukraine, the PEN statement said.

Amelina also wrote and recited poetry, delivering what would be her final performance at a literary festival in Kyiv just three days before the missile attack.

One of her latest poems, titled “Sirens”, laid bare the everyday reality of Ukrainians facing Russian missiles: “Air-raid sirens across the country/ It feels like everyone is brought out/ For execution/ But only one person gets targeted/ Usually the one at the edge/ Today it’s not you; all clear.”

Amelina’s recent work included the publication of a diary kept by fellow Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, who was kidnapped and killed last spring by Russian soldiers near Izyum, in the eastern Kharkiv region. Vakulenko had buried his writings before being taken. Amelina unearthed them in September.

“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 is survived by her young son.

Additional reporting by John Paul Rathbone in London