As we celebrated our independence, Ukrainians fought and died to keep theirs

As we celebrated the Fourth of July with hot dogs and fireworks, mourners gathered at Kyiv’s famous St. Michael’s Golden-Domed Cathedral. They were paying last respects to one of Ukraine’s most noted young writers.

Victoria Amelina, 37, was fatally wounded by a Russian missile strike on Saturday at a large, well-known pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. At the time, it was filled with journalists, humanitarian aid workers, local families, and probably some soldiers taking time away from the front lines.

How like the Russians to bomb a pizza place.

I didn’t know Amelina but have several Ukrainian friends who did, including one who was at her hospital bedside as she lay in an irreversible coma.

I’m writing about her not to guilt-trip those who enjoyed their backyard barbecue this week, but because she inspired such admiration from her peers. She had paused her successful literary career to investigate and document war crimes in areas liberated by Ukrainian forces from Russian occupation.

We should look to Ukrainian heroes like Amelina for inspiration every time we get queasy about the possibility that a certain Putin admirer might be reelected in 2024. Her struggle to protect Ukrainian democracy was far more existential than ours, but she never gave up.

“Her death was a profound shock to everyone in the literary community,” I was told on WhatsApp by Tetyana Ogarkova, a Ukrainian literary scholar and journalist. “Victoria was very loved, very modest, and independent. She could have stayed in Canada [where her father lived], but she chose to come back.”

Originally an IT specialist, Amelina could also have left Ukraine for lucrative work in Europe, but she stayed to battle the occupiers with the written word and with her investigations. She joined up with the Ukrainian human rights organization Truth Hounds, which has worked for the past eight years to document human rights violations in Ukraine, and elsewhere in areas once controlled by Moscow.

According to the Kyiv Independent newspaper, the prosecutor general’s office had recorded over 80,000 war crimes by March that were allegedly committed by the Russian military in Ukraine. They ranged from over 400 civilians whose bodies were strewn in the streets in Bucha to the bombing of a theater containing hundreds of women and children in Mariupol, and on and on.

Even as I write, Ukrainian officials fear that Russian soldiers may set off mines at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which they occupy, and blame the blast on Ukraine, with the goal of stoking global hysteria about another Chernobyl.

In theory, with the plant mostly shuttered and the core heavily strengthened, the mines could explode without releasing large clouds of radiation. Or maybe not. Either way, Vladimir Putin is indifferent to civilian deaths — whether Ukrainian or Russian — and the West has not been loud enough in warning him of the repercussions for such a crime.

Putin has already gotten away with the huge ecological war crime of blowing up the Nova Kakhovka dam, also occupied by Russian troops. While there is no conclusive proof that Russia is to blame, the evidence overwhelmingly points to Moscow.

In order for war crimes cases to eventually be legally prosecuted, painstaking documentation is needed. In occupied areas, such as the dam and the nuclear power plant, that evidence can’t be collected right now.

However, in liberated territory, the work of documentation is endless. “With Victoria’s work for Truth Hounds, she never stopped traveling,” Ogarkova recalled, even to places still under shelling. “She was very brave.”

In one famous case, when investigating the disappearance of her colleague, the celebrated children’s literature writer Volodymyr Vakulenko, Amelina traveled to his parents’ village to search for his diary. He had managed to bury it near a cherry tree before the Russians dragged him away. She and his father unearthed it. (Vakulenko’s buried remains were eventually found with two bullet holes.)

Thanks to Amelina, the diary is now housed in the Kharkiv Literary Museum. His final entry ends, “Everything will be Ukraine! I believe in victory.”

“She died on July 1, which was his birthday,” Ogarkova told me. “This links two writers assassinated by the Russians.”

Yet, even as Amelina investigated war crimes, she found time to write moving poetry about the war and had plans to write a book about women at war writing about war.

She made a spontaneous trip to Kramatorsk to accompany three prominent Colombian writers and was dining with them when the missile cut her down. Twelve others died, including several young restaurant staff and twin 14-year-old girls out for pizza with their dad.

On the weekend before her death, Amelina read from her works at an international literary festival in Kyiv. Ogarkova’s husband played piano accompaniment in the background.

Some of her lines: “At night I looked at fireballs in the sky from my balcony in Kyiv and listened to explosions. I went to sleep without checking the news. The war is when you can no longer follow all news and cry about all neighbors who died instead of you a couple of miles away. Still, I want to not forget to learn the names.”

Remember the name Victoria Amelina. It should inspire us all.