Author who had been working to document Russian war crimes since the invasion was hospitalised with skull fractures after Tuesday’s missile strike
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.
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.
“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 had been in the city with a delegation of Colombian journalists and writers, PEN said.
She was hospitalised with “multiple skull fractures”, according to a surgeon treating the wounded.
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 poems, prose and essays have been translated into English, German, Polish and other languages.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
“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.”
Ria Pizza in Kramatorsk, one of the largest cities still under Ukrainian control in the east, was popular with soldiers, journalists and aid workers.
Amelina’s death takes the toll from the missile strike to 13.
Source: The Guardian
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