On 12 October last year, I met up in Kyiv with the novelist and war crimes investigator Victoria Amelina, who died on 1 July from injuries sustained in an attack on a Kramatorsk pizza restaurant. We had first encountered each other some days earlier at a literary festival, Lviv BookForum, and taken the same overnight train to the Ukrainian capital. Ninety minutes after we arrived, on the morning of 10 October, Moscow targeted the city centre with cruise missiles.
The first person I rang to make sense of events, after the deafening whoosh-bang shook my hotel room windows, was Amelina. Her taxi home had taken her past three of the missile sites. Being absolutely unshakable in her calmness, and because of her determination to bear witness to events, she had got out of her taxi, filmed the smoking craters and recorded precisely what she had seen. One of the missiles had destroyed a children’s playground in Taras Shevchenko park nearby which, two days later, we were now sitting.
