Stalin erased one generation of Ukraine’s artists. Now Putin is killing another – including my friend | Charlotte Higgins
Jul 14, 2023
4 minutes
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
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