When Russia attacked Ukraine on 24 February 2022, Victoria Amelina was a novelist and children’s writer, and the founder of a literary festival staged in New York, a town in the Donetsk region. But the invasion, of course, changed everything. What purpose did fiction have now, Amelina wondered? Wanting fervently to be useful, in the next weeks and months she worked in a humanitarian warehouse in Lviv, found vital medicines for those who needed them, and helped to evacuate both civilians and their pets from the most dangerous corners of the country. Most significantly of all, she volunteered as a war crimes researcher, training with a Kyiv-based NGO called Truth Hounds.
If such work was horrifying, it was also inspirational. Soon, she was thinking of a different kind of literary project: a book about the women who, like her, were taking huge risks to document the war. She would write this book in English, and in it she would deploy a purposeful jumble of interviews, diary entries, reports from field missions, Ukrainian history and even poetry. Such a book, she believed, wouldn’t only play its small part in holding the perpetrators accountable; one day, it would help to give “lasting peace a chance”. For a year, she worked on it, even as she performed all her other roles. On 27 June 2023, however, she was in a pizzeria in Kramatorsk in Donetsk when it was hit by a Russian missile. Sixty-four people were injured and 13 killed. Amelina died in hospital a few days later.
Looking at Women, Looking at War was then far from finished. But after they’d said goodbye to her, a group of friends and colleagues – Tetyana Teren, Yaryna Grusha, Sasha Dovzhyk and Amelina’s husband, Alex Amelin – decided to try to make her manuscript publishable. What she had completed, they would leave alone; what she had not, they would supplement with transcriptions of audio files, material from earlier drafts and copious footnotes. The result, as they acknowledge in an afterword, is a patchwork that is sometimes difficult to follow – and yet, the gaps are so eloquent. Amelina’s absence may be felt on every page. The reader’s confusion, experienced by me as a terrible slow-wittedness, is one of the book’s most powerful effects. It slows you down. It transmits a powerful sense of chaos. It compels attentiveness, as the TV news does not.
The protocols involved in documenting war crimes are precise and extremely rigorous, and Looking at Women, Looking at War goes into some detail on this score. The book includes in its entirety a report of the last mission Amelina undertook (she travelled with a colleague whose codename is Casanova to Balakliia, a community in Kharkiv oblast) and if you’ve never set eyes on such a document before, to do so is chastening, to put it mildly. The baldness of the words – this might as well be a mortgage application, for all the adjectives it contains – only makes the rapes, torture and detentions it outlines seem the more abominable. Such exactness, written ledger-style over several pages, provides a chilling sense of scale, for this is just one place among hundreds, perhaps thousands.
But the sections of the book I found most vivid arrive earlier on, as Amelina tries repeatedly to come to terms with what is happening. For a decade, she writes, Ukrainians had been prepared for war without ever grasping that it is impossible truly to be ready for a world turned upside down. When war first breaks out, she is on holiday with her small son; as the explosions begin, she’s marooned in an Egyptian airport, all flights to Ukraine cancelled. In the end, she travels by plane to Warsaw, and thence overland via Prague to Ukraine – a journey that in itself reminds the complacent European, safe in Paris or London, of just how close the conflict is.
Surreal is an overused adjective, but only it will do in these circumstances. Arriving in Kharkiv for work, she and her colleagues use Google Maps to find their hotel, even as the air raid sirens sound. In her childhood home outside Lviv, she writes of feeling “illogically safe”, in spite of the fact that the apartment is close to a legitimate military target. In Kharkiv, she watches two men playing ping-pong, to the thump of regular explosions. In Bucha, the deputy mayor’s son plays close by as a team working on body identification examine a pile of gruesome photographs.
How to process such things? As the months roll on, it’s sometimes hard to feel anything at all. Her colleague Oleksandra Matviichuk tells her that when this happens, she should find a pot of face cream and rub it into her cheeks: its coldness, softness and scent will bring her back to life, she’ll find. And it’s true. After a day of heavy bombardments in Kyiv – people are saying the Russians’ target is a monument to the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko – Amelina tries it for herself, and it works. Such details doubtless won’t be found in any of the bigger, more complete books that will one day be written about the war in Ukraine, but to me they are of inestimable worth: not fiction but written, nevertheless, with the fine sensibility of a novelist.
Looking at Women, Looking at War: A War and Justice Diary by Victoria Amelina is published by William Collins (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
