05 Jul 23 | News and features, Russia, Ukraine
They shot the children’s poet in the head. Two bullets from a Makharov, the Russian army handgun, his grave identified, his voice stilled. Until, that is, Victoria Amelina turned up at the Izium home of the murdered poet, Volodymyr Vakulenko. Gentle, calm, dogged, Victoria had stopped work as a novelist to become a war crimes investigator, her mission to listen to Ukraine’s bereaved: “That it is not like ‘this happened’ and nobody asks them about it.”
She found Vakulenko’s father, crushed by grief, and over the course of a long conversation, his memory unlocked and he said that his son had told him that he had buried his diary near the cherry tree in the family’s garden. They dug and dug.
Nothing.
And then Victoria, on impulse, opened up the earth a little distance from the tree and they found the dead poet’s diary, wrapped in water-proof plastic, breaking the silence. The diary told of Russian occupation, of a tank squatting outside in the street, the creeping sense of dread, his arrest, release – and then they came for him one last time. But not before he had buried his words by the cherry tree.
Victoria understood that the best stories are the ones that power and money do not want told. That was last year.
In late June Victoria was sitting outside on the terrace at the Ria pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, about thirty miles from Bakhmut. The Ria is an institution, a sweet hiding hole where journalists, aid workers, soldiers and local families unwind from the horrors of the frontline. Driven by my fixer in Ukraine, Dima Kovalchuk, Victoria was escorting Colombian journalists, Héctor Abad, Sergio Jaramillo and Catalina Gómez around the war zone. Victoria was doing her best to shine a light on the Kremlin’s dark nonsense. Too many people in the global south have bought into the Russian lie but not these South Americans.
Dima told me: “the awning above is see-through and I saw a shadow overhead, it was the missile, then this intense explosion.”
Jaramillo explained to the Financial Times: “I was sitting right next to Victoria. We had just finished a day in the field, talking to people about the Russian invasion. As the food was brought to us, I bent down to pick up a napkin and, at that moment, the missile struck. Victoria, who had been sitting upright, was badly hit at the back of the neck… the whole room fell to pieces and time stopped.”
Dima said that Victoria never recovered from her head injury. The rest of the team were lightly injured. Thirteen people died, including two fourteen-year-old twins; fifty people were injured. Firing a cruise missile at a pizza restaurant packed with civilians was yet another Russian war crime.
Victoria was born in Lviv, moved to Canada when she was a teenager, worked in IT, got bored with that and became a full-time writer. Her first novel, Fall Syndrome, was about the Maidan revolution, her second, Dom’s Dream Kingdom, established her international reputation. She won the Joseph Conrad Literary Award and was short-listed for the European Union Prize for Literature. Before the big war she set up a literary festival in New York, a village not far from Bakhmut, and a second in Kramatorsk. Her poetry was spare and bleak:
Sirens
Air-raid sirens across the country
It feels like everyone is brought out
For execution
But only one person gets targeted
Usually the one at the edge
This time not you; all clear
I met Victoria once, at a café in Kyiv, this spring. She recognised my silly orange hat and we talked about working together, one day, on a war crimes investigation but our schedules didn’t work out and that never happened. There was a still beauty about her spirit that is haunting, an echo from a friend, calling out the big lie.
I cannot believe they have silenced her.
I cannot believe that she is dead.
30 Jun 23 | News and features, Newsletters, Russia, Ukraine
Last week’s mutiny by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, provided a challenge to established western media outlets, such was the speed of the advance by the man known as Putin’s chef towards Moscow and the lack of verifiable information coming out of Russia. The subsequent accommodation between Prigozhin and Putin, apparently brokered by the Belarus leader Alyaksandr Lukashenska, has left even the most seasoned neo-Kremlinologists scratching their heads.
Step forward the Russian dissidents and independent news services. Index has been privileged to work with the opposition to Putin since long before the war in Ukraine and it was good to see them coming into their own last week. Here are some of our recommendations for those who want to stay abreast of the fast-moving and often baffling developments in Russia. Kevin Rothrock (@KevinRothrock), the managing editor of the English-language version of the independent online site Meduza, kept his Twitter feed consistently updated during the coup-that-never-was. Where others were breathless and over-excited, Rothrock was calm and measured. His colleague Lilya Yapparova (@lilia_yapparova) provided detailed analysis on the future of Prigozhin from sources inside the Russian military and the Wagner Group itself. Yapparova’s far-reaching investigation looks into what Wagner forces might contribute to Belarusian military capacity and the organisation’s operations in Africa and Syria. She also looks into Wagner’s finances in Russia, its continued recruitment for the war in Ukraine and internet trolling operations. Yapporova quotes the work of Dossier Center, a media outlet connected to the British-based Putin opponent Mikhail Khodorkovsksy, which tracks criminals associated with the Russian president. Khodorkovsky himself was active on his Telegram channel throughout the mutiny and accessible to non-Russian speakers through the messaging app’s translate function. Controversially he urged Russians to support Prigozhin’s coup. His view was that anything would be better than Putin. The Russian billionaire later concluded that the outcome of Prigozhin’s operation was not important. “The very fact that this happened is a powerful blow to Putin after which he will be perceived differently by millions.”
Doxa, the publication founded by students opposed by Putin and now outlawed by the regime, continues to do a good job of aggregating news from reliable sources. This week it included a report from The Bell, founded by Russian financial journalist Elizaveta Osetinskaya, suggesting that Prigozhin’s troll factory companies have been paralysed following raids after the uprising and were looking for a new owner. Osetinskaya, a former editor of Russian Forbes magazine, was declared a foreign agent after condemning the invasion of Ukraine.
In a new development this week, Novaya Gazeta, the independent Russian news outlet whose editor Dmitry Muratov won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, was put on the Kremlin’s list of “undesirable” organisations. This makes it a crime for the publication, now based in Latvia, to operate in Russia. It is also now illegal for Russians to engage with the publication or share its content online.
OVD-Info, the human rights project which won the 2022 Index on Censorship campaigning award, decided not to provide a running commentary of events and stuck to its mission of reporting on arrests of regime opponents. In his weekly newsletter Dan Storyev, English editor of OVD-Info, wrote: “Russia has had a busy few days as I am sure we all know. This newsletter is not for military analysis so I won’t cover Prigozhin’s manoeuvres here — but it’s important to remember, that in the end, it is going to be ordinary Russians, Russian civil society who would bear the brunt of any violence that a coup, or a paranoid preventive crackdown could unleash.”
If there is one thing that unites all the outlets mentioned here (beyond their undoubted courage), it is the care they take in the sourcing of all information they publish. In the post-truth world of Putin’s Russia, facts are precious commodities.
17 May 23
Nariman Dzhelal is the jailed leader of the Crimean Tatars, arguably the most persecuted group in Ukraine.
