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Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina dies after being wounded in Kramatorsk strike Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina dies after being wounded in Kramatorsk strike
(about 8 hours later)
Author who had been working to document Russian war crimes since the invasion was hospitalised with skull fractures after Tuesday’s missile strike Tributes paid to celebrated author who had been documenting Russian war crimes since the invasion
An award-winning Ukrainian writer and war crimes researcher wounded in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant last week has died, the freedom of expression group PEN has said. The award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina, who was wounded last week in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant, has died from her injuries.
Victoria Amelina, 37, was wounded when a Russian missile destroyed the Ria Pizza restaurant in the eastern city of Kramatorsk on Tuesday, killing 12 people, including four children, and wounding dozens. Tributes to both Amelina’s activism and her writing poured in from across the worlds of literature and politics, after PEN Ukraine announced she had died in a hospital in Dnipro, surrounded by friends and family.
“With our greatest pain, we inform you that Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina passed away on July 1st in Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro,” PEN Ukraine said in a statement on its Facebook page on Sunday. Amelina, 37, won the Joseph Conrad literary prize in 2021 for work’s including Dom’s Dream Kingdom and had been nominated for other major awards including the European Union Prize for Literature.
Amelina had been in the city with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers, PEN said. She largely set aside her writing after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, to focus on documenting war crimes and working with children on or near the frontline.
She was hospitalised with “multiple skull fractures”, according to a surgeon treating the wounded. “Victoria Amelina was one of kindest and most charitable Ukrainian writers who did much more for others than for herself,” said the novelist Andrey Kurkov on Twitter. “She founded two literary festivals, in New York (Donbas) and in Kramatorsk, where her life was stopped by a Russian missile.”
Her novel Dom’s Dream Kingdom was published in 2017 and shortlisted for the Unesco city of literature prize and the European Union prize for literature, according to PEN. Her work included unearthing the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a fellow writer who was illegally detained and killed by Russian soldiers in the city of Izium in early 2022. The diary, which was buried in his garden, served as a real-time document of Russian atrocities.
Her poems, prose and essays have been translated into English, German, Polish and other languages. Human rights groups say the attack that killed Amelina, on a popular restaurant crowded with civilians in eastern Kramatorsk, was also a war crime. Thirteen people died and more than 60 were injured.
Since 2022 she had been working to document Russian war crimes since the invasion and advocate for accountability, as well as working with children on or near the front line. The writer was travelling with Colombian journalists and writers to document war crimes and build support for Ukraine in the global south.
Amelina’s work included unearthing the diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a fellow writer who was illegally detained and killed by Russian soldiers in the city of Izium at the start of the war. The diary, which was buried in his garden, served as a real-time documentation of Russian atrocities. She was acutely aware of the risks she was taking. Her work forced her into frequent, close inspection of the destructive power of Russian weapons. “We are, you could say, obsessed about our freedom, and we’re ready to die for it. Russians cannot forgive us for that,” she said seven months before she was killed.
Russia claimed the Kramatorsk attack targeted the Ukrainian military and foreign mercenaries. The war crimes campaign group Truth Hounds spoke to witnesses who confirmed there were no military targets at the site. She also warned that an invading army that denied Ukraine’s right to exist would target artists and writers. There was a bleak historical precedent in the “Executed Renaissance” generation of intellectuals killed in the Soviet Union a century ago.
“There were no military objects that could have been a legal target for the attack around that day,” the group had said in a joint statement with PEN. “Now there is a real threat that Russians will successfully execute another generation of Ukrainian culture – this time by missiles and bombs,” she wrote in a prescient article. A foreword she wrote for Vakulenko’s diary places his death in the context of those earlier killings.
“Analysis of the destruction and witness testimonies indicate that, most likely, Russia’s armed forces used an Iskander missile to carry out the attack. This is a missile with a high accuracy, so Russians knew exactly what it would hit.” Amelina put her commitment to her country and its most vulnerable people ahead of her personal safety, training to gather evidence of war crimes that could be used in future prosecutions. She also built networks with foreign journalists and intellectuals to raise support for Ukraine internationally.
Ria Pizza in Kramatorsk, one of the largest cities still under Ukrainian control in the east, was popular with soldiers, journalists and aid workers. Before her death, she had been working on a non-fiction book about Ukrainian women’s experience of the invasion, Looking at Women Looking at War: War and Justice Diary, which will be published in English, together with Dom’s Dream Kingdom.
Amelina’s death takes the toll from the missile strike to 13. She had been awarded a Columbia University fellowship in Paris, and planned to move there in the autumn with her 12 year-old son.
Emma Graham-Harrison contributed to this report Born in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv in 1986, Amelina spent time in Canada with her father as a child. She studied computer science at university and spent a decade working in the tech industry before publishing her first novel in 2015 and building a career in literature.
Her work always mixed the political and the artistic. In 2021, she founded a literary festival in New York, Donetsk, a small town that since 2014 has been near the frontline. It was a typical example of her playful spirit, eye for capturing attention and commitment to celebrating and supporting Ukrainian defiance and grassroots culture.
“When I founded New York literature festival in a small village called New York in the Donbas, I was, of course, being ironic. After all, irony is what makes literature great. Self-irony made the village of New York a fantastic place. Russians have no self-irony. They are so serious about themselves,” she wrote on Twitter, after Russian forces bombed the festival site.
“But Ukrainians will survive, laugh and make literature festivals, not war – in all possible New Yorks. I promise.”
PEN Ukraine promised to keep those festivals going. “For us, Victoria’s friends and colleagues, it is very important the cultural initiatives set up by her could last. Very soon we will share with you information about the ways you can support her life’s work.”