Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened: A Bouquet for Victoria Amelina

At thirty-seven, Victoria Amelina was one of Ukraine’s most promising young writers, on the verge of a major international career, when Russia’s full-scale invasion against Ukraine broke out. On hearing the news, Victoria, who was traveling in Egypt with her ten-year-old son, headed home. After dropping him off with her mother in Krakow, she hurried back to her native Lviv, where she joined her fellow citizens as a full-time volunteer, collecting supplies to aid the soldiers on the front lines. On seeing the horrors of war up close, Victoria decided that wasn’t enough, so she signed up with Truth Hounds, a decade-old human rights organization committed to documenting war crimes. She began a new book, War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War, in which she wrote about the women who had set aside their own lives in order to document war crimes. On June 27th, Victoria was dining in a restaurant near the front lines when a missile struck and Victoria herself became the victim of a war crime.