I recently read an article about how this popular writer got herself trained to report war crimes. Her death is one tragedy on top of another.

Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina dies after being wounded in Kramatorsk strike

The award-winning Ukrainian novelist, essayist and war crimes researcher Victoria Amelina, who was wounded last week in a Russian missile strike on a restaurant, has died from her injuries.

Tributes to both Amelina’s activism and her writing poured in from across the worlds of literature and politics, after PEN Ukraine announced she had died in a hospital in Dnipro, surrounded by friends and family.

Amelina, 37, won the Joseph Conrad literary prize in 2021 for work’s including Dom’s Dream Kingdom and had been nominated for other major awards including the European Union Prize for Literature.

She largely set aside her writing after the full-scale Russian invasion of 2022, to focus on documenting war crimes and working with children on or near the frontline.

“Victoria Amelina was one of kindest and most charitable Ukrainian writers who did much more for others than for herself,” said the novelist Andrey Kurkov on Twitter. “She founded two literary festivals, in New York (Donbas) and in Kramatorsk, where her life was stopped by a Russian missile.”

Her 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 in early 2022. The diary, which was buried in his garden, served as a real-time document of Russian atrocities.

Human rights groups say the attack that killed Amelina, on a popular restaurant crowded with civilians in eastern Kramatorsk, was also a war crime. Thirteen people died and more than 60 were injured.