Looking at Women Looking at War

Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian novelist and mother, frames this unfinished book as both a war diary and a story about extraordinary women pursuing justice in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Amelina describes how the war transformed her from a literary writer into a war crimes researcher for Truth Hounds, a Ukrainian NGO that documents violations of international humanitarian law. The book spans from mid-February 2022 to mid-2023 and poses the questions that drive its narrative: What is justice? How can people live with unpunished perpetrators? What tools does one choose to fight for accountability? Amelina was killed by a Russian missile strike on a restaurant in Kramatorsk on June 27, 2023, leaving the manuscript roughly 60 percent complete. An editorial group assembled the surviving drafts, field reports, and notes into the present volume.

The book opens in Lviv on February 16, 2022, when Amelina bought her first gun, locked it in a safe, and departed with her ten-year-old son, Andriy, for a vacation in Egypt. At the airport, she read about an artillery shell hitting a kindergarten in Stanytsia Luhanska, near the front line separating Ukrainian and Russian forces since 2014. On February 22 in Luxor, Andriy ran laps around an ancient stone scarab and wished for Vladimir Putin to die. That same day, Russia formally recognized the puppet governments it had created in occupied eastern Ukraine, signaling that a full-scale invasion was imminent.

Amelina introduces several women whose stories interweave with her own. Evhenia Zakrevska, a prominent Kyiv lawyer, had spent eight years representing families of protesters killed during the 2014 Revolution of Dignity, a popular uprising that ousted Ukraine's pro-Russian president. When the invasion began, Zakrevska insisted that Ukrainian institutions must keep functioning; when courts did not open, she and her husband joined the territorial defense of Kyiv. Casanova, a veteran Truth Hounds field researcher who uses a pseudonym for safety, had quit war crimes documentation at the end of 2021, dreaming of a house with a cherry-tree garden. On February 24, she executed a prepared evacuation plan from Kharkiv and within days asked for her old job back. Iryna Dovhan, who had been tortured during Russian captivity in Donetsk in 2014 and freed after a New York Times photograph of her public beating drew international attention, joined a medical evacuation team near Kyiv. Iryna Novitska, Volodymyr Vakulenko's ex-wife and a former postgraduate student of Ukrainian literature who uses a wheelchair, desperately messaged the children's author, begging him to flee Kapytolivka, a village near Izyum, with their son, who has autism spectrum disorder. Vakulenko's last message, on March 7, described Russian forces entering the village. Then communication went silent.

Amelina learned of the invasion while stranded in an Egyptian airport. She found a flight to Prague, crossed into Ukraine via Poland on February 26, and reached her Lviv apartment, which she turned into a shelter for displaced families. On March 8, she drove her mother, sister, niece, and dog to the Polish border, spending over 20 hours in a line of refugees.

As the invasion unfolded, the book introduces more women. Zhenia Podobna, a war correspondent in Irpin near Kyiv, watched Russian attack helicopters fly toward Hostomel airport and believed the capital might fall, until one helicopter was shot down. Tetyana Pylypchuk, director of the Kharkiv Literature Museum, evacuated irreplaceable manuscripts of the Executed Renaissance, a generation of Ukrainian writers killed by Stalin's regime in the 1930s, aboard a darkened train heading west. In occupied Kapytolivka, Vakulenko and the village librarian Yulia Kakulya-Danylyuk each began keeping war diaries. Vakulenko buried his diary in the garden before Russian soldiers took him away on March 24. Yulia continued writing as the village's sole chronicler.

Amelina also introduces Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Center for Civil Liberties, a human rights organization that had been documenting war crimes since 2014. In June 2022, Amelina wrote to Matviichuk asking to document her pursuit of justice; Matviichuk agreed immediately, and their collaboration shaped the book's direction.

On April 8, Russian missiles struck the Kramatorsk railway station, killing 61 civilians; one bore the painted inscription "FOR THE CHILDREN." Later that month, Amelina began training as a war crimes researcher at Truth Hounds, learning to collect witness testimonies and work with traumatized survivors without causing further harm. On June 9, she learned that Roman Ratushny, a 24-year-old activist and soldier whose mother was her close friend, the poet Svitlana Povalyaeva, had been killed in the Kharkiv region. Because Ratushny was a combatant, the only legal avenue to hold his killers accountable was prosecution for the crime of aggression: the decision by Russian leadership to wage the war itself.

The book's middle sections interleave Amelina's field research with her heroines' stories. She visited the writer Vira Kuryko in missile-damaged Chernihiv, where Kuryko was documenting the war's toll on ordinary people. She accompanied Matviichuk to Brussels and London to advocate for international justice mechanisms. She documented the case of Yan Zolotar, a civilian from the village of Mala Oleksandrivka in the Kherson region, who was abducted at a checkpoint, then tortured with electric shocks and mock executions before being released. Amelina introduces Kateryna Rashevska, a young lawyer tracking children forcibly transferred from Ukraine to Russia. This practice is defined as genocide under the Rome Statute, the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court (ICC).

After the Ukrainian counteroffensive liberated the Kharkiv region in September 2022, Amelina joined a Truth Hounds mission to Izyum. The team discovered torture chambers, documented dozens of abductions, and recorded testimony from a morgue worker who had witnessed a Chechen soldier murder a Ukrainian forensic expert. Amelina traveled to Kapytolivka, where she and Vakulenko's father searched his garden and she unearthed the buried diary, wrapped in plastic film beneath a cherry tree. She delivered it to the Kharkiv Literature Museum.

At the Lviv BookForum in October 2022, Amelina spoke with the British human rights lawyer Philippe Sands about his proposal for an International Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression. Sands argued that the ICC was unlikely to reach senior Russian leadership and advised Amelina to write a book about Vakulenko. Days later, Russia launched mass missile attacks on Ukrainian energy infrastructure and cultural sites. Matviichuk won the Nobel Peace Prize as part of the Center for Civil Liberties, though many Ukrainians were ambivalent about sharing the award with Russian and Belarusian advocates.

In 2023, incremental victories emerged alongside continued loss. The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia's commissioner for children's rights, in March, based partly on evidence Rashevska had gathered on forcible child transfers. Yan Zolotar, whose torture Amelina had documented, was killed by a landmine near his liberated village in January. Kyiv renamed a street after Ratushny, and Izyum named one after Vakulenko. The Kharkiv Literature Museum reopened on Poetry Day with a single object on display: Vakulenko's diary. Amelina's final field mission with Casanova, in March 2023, documented 35 testimonies of torture, detention, and killing across 11 settlements. Casanova then left Truth Hounds to train as a deminer, having bought land with a garden near Kharkiv, a stubborn return to her dream of a new home.

In the book's closing passages, Amelina visits each heroine one final time. Dovhan showed her embroidered shirts bought for her family to wear on the day of victory. Zakrevska showed her how to attach a grenade to a drone, and Amelina considered that she might one day join the army herself. She planted flowers in Vakulenko's garden alongside the librarian Yulia, refusing gloves because she had found the diary without them. She boarded a night train to Kharkiv carrying Vakulenko's posthumous international publishers' award and children's books for Kramatorsk. A poster advertising a theater performance scheduled for February 26, 2022, that was never staged still hung on the Kharkiv Drama Theater building.

A poem serves as the epilogue: A woman in black stands in a barren field, crying her sisters' names into the ground, from which new sisters will grow. The afterword, written by the editorial group, recounts Amelina's death at age 37. She died on July 1, Vakulenko's birthday. The editors describe the chapters she never filled and the stories that survive only as fragments, framing the book as both a work of literature and a testimony to the emptiness her death left behind.