There is an expression used more and more in the Ukraine as the war drags on. It is “the price to pay for victory.” In reality, it is not something ethereal, but rather tangible losses: cities destroyed to the ground, jobs that will never return, landscapes abandoned perhaps forever and, above all, human lives by the thousands, tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, which will take away this Russian invasion. This Tuesday, kyiv has fired one of its most brilliant writers, embarked like the rest of the country on a desperate resistance: Victoria Amelina.
Under the impressive golden domes of the church of San Miguel, a broken family dressed in black and a multitude of friends and readers bid farewell to Amelina with a funeral mass in which the orthodox rituals of choir and incense were not lacking. This writer, one of the most awarded in her country and known throughout the world, had abandoned fiction to dedicate herself to documenting the untraceable war crimes that the Russian army is leaving behind in her country.
A week ago, Victoria Amelina dined at the Ria restaurant in the Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk with the Colombian writer Héctor Abad Faciolince, the former peace commissioner Sergio Jaramillo and the reporter Catalina Gómez, who acted as their guide. “It was a terrifying noise, as if she came out of the center of the Earth,” Facelylince recounted. Catalina Gómez assures that Victoria remained sitting next to her, “apparently without injuries, but with her eyes closed and unconscious.” From that day until the 1st, she had remained in critical condition. A wound in the back of her skull, where a piece of shrapnel lodged, ended her life in a few days.
The Russian army first assured that the attack was not carried out by them but by a Ukrainian missile. A few hours later they did admit that the missile was Russian and that’s when the already usual parade of lies from the Moscow regime began. The bombardment, carried out with an Iskander ballistic missile, one of the most precise in its arsenal that is worth about three million euros, had taken place against the pizzeria because inside “there was a command post of an army brigade”. When that sounded too absurd even for Moscow propaganda, they improvised another response: “There was a party of Ukrainian International Legion servicemen,” resulting in “two generals killed and 50 other soldiers killed.”
This information is false, because there was no party inside, nor did Russia kill two generals. What there was, and it is logical, are some soldiers having dinner with their girlfriends, especially in the case of a city where the military deployment is so great. Therefore, the bombardment is unjustifiable. The death count is 13 civilians, with at least two girls among them, in addition to 60 wounded. Amelina was the victim of one of the war crimes that she herself insisted on denouncing. Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, only managed to say, always cynically, that the Russian Army “does not attack civilian infrastructure.”
“War is when you can no longer follow all the news and cry for all the neighbors who died in your place a couple of kilometers away. Even so, I do not want to forget to learn the names,” Victoria Amelina wrote. Following her funeral, a long line of readers and friends laid flowers by her coffin.
The brutal attack on the Kramatorsk pizzeria is one more example of the gratuitous violence to which Russia subjects border cities or with Russia or its occupied areas. Zaporizhia, Sloviansk, Kharkiv or Sumi suffer similar attacks almost every week. Being so close to the missile launchers, it is impossible for the anti-aircraft alert to notify the neighbors in time. A pro-Russian informant was arrested in Kramatorsk hours later by the Ukrainian intelligence service accused of recording and sending images of the restaurant to the enemy to mark it as a target for the Russian army.
After the pizzeria bombing, two politicians of the Russian regime made statements. One of them, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, assured that “those attacks are going to continue because Ukraine has declared war on Russia”, without us yet knowing exactly what statement he is referring to, and Dimitri Medvedev, who was once considered “a moderate” of the regime: “The war with Ukraine will be something permanent”. It is another example of the descent into hell of an increasingly totalitarian regime that loses the war on the battlefield but still retains enormous capacities to harm the civilian population of Ukraine, punished time and again for failing to facilitate the invasion as planned by the Kremlin.
The huge problem for Ukraine is that this war and civil effort is taking the best of its generation. Already in 2014, those born beyond independence decided to throw off the yoke of Moscow with the Maidan. Those same young men occupy the trenches today, accompanied by their parents and, soon, their children. Victoria Amelina is the daughter of the Maidan and of that movement. Meanwhile, Russia multiplies the Storm Z units, brigades made up of criminals and criminals from prisons. “We lose the best while the Russians clean up their prisons,” a Ukrainian journalist complained at the funeral.
Outside St. Michael’s of the Golden Domes, where the Ukrainian capital bid farewell to one of its most talented daughters, the Ukrainian authorities continue to add Russian armored vehicles to their permanent display. Luckily, the one with the burned tanks is the only parade of Russian tanks that has been seen around here.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project