She saved the diary of a Ukrainian writer killed by Russia. Then she was killed, too

KAPYTOLIVKA, KYIV AND LVIV, Ukraine — Last fall, the novelist Victoria Amelina found herself frantically digging up a fellow writer's backyard in northeastern Ukraine.

She was looking for a diary belonging to children's author Volodymyr Vakulenko. He usually wrote offbeat, deeply empathetic poems for children but his diary was about life under Russian occupation.

After hours of fruitless digging alongside the writer's father, Amelina felt a twinge of grief and panic.

"The moment when I thought we wouldn't be able to find this diary perhaps is still the scariest moment for me," Amelina said late last May. "At this moment, I felt my head spinning, thinking about all the Ukrainian manuscripts that have been lost over the past centuries, and this might be another one."

In an essay for the literary and free expression group PEN Ukraine last year, Amelina wrote that imperial and Soviet Russia had long suppressed Ukrainian culture. She described how, in the 1930s, Soviets murdered Ukrainian writers and intellectuals, destroying their manuscripts and confiscating literary magazines that published their work.

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, she said, she felt like it was