A well-known eatery used by journalists and aid agencies in eastern Ukraine, according to PEN America. Victoria Amelina died as a result of the injuries she sustained in the attack.
The literature and human rights organisation stated in a statement on Sunday that Amelina, 37, who had switched her focus from writing to documenting Russian war crimes after the takeover, passed away from her wounds during the June 27 attack in the city of Kramatorsk.
Oleksandr Tkachenko, minister of culture for Ukraine, offered his sympathies to Amelina’s family and added that Russia was to blame. “The terrorist deserves the strongest possible penalty for every crime committed on our soil, for every life interrupted and unspoken word,” he stated.
Amelina was mourned by her friends, coworkers, and admirers. Many said that she had a life full of opportunities that was unfortunately cut short. Journalist Olga Tokariuk, a close friend of Amelina’s, tweeted, “So many books not written down, stories untold, days unlived.”
“Victoria was compiling evidence of Russian war crimes. She perished as a result of another war crime. We stand in solidarity with the thousands of people who have died in Ukraine, tweets historian Olesya Khromeychuk.
Around time for dinner, when the restaurant was typically busy, at least 11 additional people were killed and 61 injured. A day later, Ukrainian officials detained a guy on the grounds that he had assisted Russia in planning the attack.
The bombing and others that day in Ukraine suggested that, despite domestic political and military unrest following a brief armed rebellion in Russia on June 24, the Kremlin is continuing its systematic bombardment of the country.
Amelina’s passing was reported by PEN Ukraine when her family was made aware of it. Amelina traveled to Kramatorsk with a group of journalists and authors from Colombia. With the aid of the human rights group Truth Hounds, she had been compiling information on Russian war crimes.
“Famous Ukrainian author Victoria Amelina transferred her strong and different voice to writing.
Amelina was born in Lviv on January 1st, 1986. Her debut book, “The November Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens,” which made the short list for the Ukrainian Valeriy Shevchuk Prize, was published in 2014.
She later produced two critically acclaimed children’s novels, “Somebody, or Waterheart,” as well as “Storie-e-es of Eka the Excavator,” another novel. Her book, “Dom’s Dream Kingdom,” won awards on a national and international level in 2017, including the European Union Prize for Literature and the UNESCO City of Literature Prize.
Her works of fiction and nonfiction have been translated into many different languages, including English, Polish, Italian, German, Croatian, Dutch, Czech, and Hungarian. She is a well-known young author.
She established the New York Literature Festival in 2021, which is held in a small Ukrainian village named New York.
Amelina has devoted her time to recording Russian criminal acts in eastern Ukraine ever since the invasion began, according to PEN America. She found the journal of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a Ukrainian author murdered by the Russians, in Kapytolivka, a neighborhood close to Izium.
In a potent essay, Amelina focused on the tragic story of Hanna, an old woman evacuated from the Donbas to the relatively secure region of western Ukraine, to illustrate the fate of Soviet period followers caught in the crossfire of the 2014 Russian invasion. Even after it is revealed to her that there may be a Russian tank stationed in her lawn, Hanna continues to proclaim her desire to return home until the moment of her death.
“I did what I could: I’m a writer, and perhaps my strongest work is writing the truth,”
I attempted to take up arms versus their lies because I could not defend anybody from the Russian bombardment, according to Amelina.
A few time before she passed away, she also started writing her first piece of English nonfiction. In her book “War and Justice Diary: Seeing at Women Seeing at War,” Amelina tells tales of Ukrainian women who gathered proof of Russian war crimes. The publication is anticipated to occur soon, stated PEN Ukraine.