The Ria is an institution, a sweet hiding hole where journalists, aid workers, soldiers and local families unwind from the horrors of the frontline. In late June Victoria was sitting outside on the terrace at the Ria pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, about thirty miles from Bakhmut. Victoria understood that the best stories are the ones that power and money do not want told. But not before he had buried his words by the cherry tree. The diary told of Russian occupation, of a tank squatting outside in the street, the creeping sense of dread, his arrest, release – and then they came for him one last time. They dug and dug.Īnd then Victoria, on impulse, opened up the earth a little distance from the tree and they found the dead poet’s diary, wrapped in water-proof plastic, breaking the silence. She found Vakulenko’s father, crushed by grief, and over the course of a long conversation, his memory unlocked and he said that his son had told him that he had buried his diary near the cherry tree in the family’s garden. Gentle, calm, dogged, Victoria had stopped work as a novelist to become a war crimes investigator, her mission to listen to Ukraine’s bereaved: “That it is not like ‘this happened’ and nobody asks them about it.” Until, that is, Victoria Amelina turned up at the Izium home of the murdered poet, Volodymyr Vakulenko. Two bullets from a Makharov, the Russian army handgun, his grave identified, his voice stilled. They shot the children’s poet in the head.
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