(Also read: Journey to the heart of Hay-on-Wye, where the Hay Festival was born)
Victoria participated in a discussion about women and war together with Janine de Giovanni and Lydia Cacho. I remember her words, she was hoping that Ukraine would win this war, because Ukraine, unlike Russia, is a liberal democracy and among other things, this meant that women played a crucial role in society and according to her this is one of the decisive factors for victory. She then told us about her book in progress Diary of war injustices: looking at women who look at war. The first profile was of Yevgenia Zakrevska who was and still is a lawyer who fought for justice for the victims murdered during the Dignity Revolution in 2014.
At another table with the lawyer and writer Philippe Sands, he commented that it was essential to create international tribunals for the crime of aggression, and that Russian leaders be punished for this war. For that he tirelessly documented all these war crimes, for the future of his country.
I saw him again at our Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias in January 2023 where we invited him along with Andrei Kurkov and Oleksandra Matviichuk, director of Civil Liberties, the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize-winning organization, with whom Victoria also collaborated, to talk about his work and activism.
There one night, on the walls of Cartagena, she, Sofia Cheliak, the programming director of the LvivBookforum, and I talked about how to restore literary festivals and ideas in a future Ukraine. Victoria had created the New York Literature Festival a few years ago, which took place in a town called New York, in the Bakhmut area of Ukraine. A month later she sent me a photo of the festival venue totally destroyed by Russian attacks via wasap with a message that said I know you will understand better than anyone how I feel today.
During a dinner coinciding with the London Book Fair we made plans to promote her recent publication in Spanish of Un hogar para Dom at a Hispanic festival. We also spoke at length about her work as a field investigator of Russian war crimes in the territories liberated from eastern, southern and northern Ukraine, including Kapitolivka near Izium, where he found the diary of the writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, murdered by the Russians and managed to have it published as another document of Russian war crimes.
On June 27, 2023, Russia committed another war crime by sending a high-precision Iskander missile into the Ria Lounge restaurant in Kramatorsk, a city in eastern Ukraine. Her colleagues from her Truth Hounds NGO documenting war crimes, with whom she had worked so long, interviewed eyewitnesses to the attack who stated that there were no military objects that could have been a legal target for the attack that day. They also confirmed that it was an ordinary day in one of the most popular restaurants in the city: up to 40 people dined, divided into small groups. Truth Hounds investigators identified that the foreigners, whom Russian propaganda called mercenaries, were actually volunteers and journalists.
Among them were Colombian peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo who launched the support campaign from Latin America, Aguanta Ukraine, Colombian writer Héctor Abad and journalist Catalina Gómez, who has been covering the Russian invasion of Ukraine since its inception for France. 24, and accompanied the seriously injured Victoria Amelina in an evacuation ambulance to the hospital.
Victoria ended up being part of one of the war crimes that she tirelessly documented.
(You may be interested: Victoria Amelina, a writer injured in a Russian attack, died: she was with three Colombians)
She was beautiful inside and out, but she carried it very lightly. It is up to us for her to continue documenting, to continue denouncing to make Ukraine a country where authors and the general public can meet without fear to imagine other possible worlds in a festival like hers, the one in New York, but in that New York of the area of Bakhmut in the Ukraine. Victoria Amelina, Rest in Peace.
Cristina Fuentes La Roche*
*International Director Hay Festival (Courtesy Iberian Press)
