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 San Miguel’s Church, 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 the 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 Hector 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 it came from the center of the Earth,” Faciolince said. 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 where the usual parade of lies of the Moscow regime. 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 injured. 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.”