Book Review: ‘Looking at Women Looking at War,’ by Victoria Amelina

LOOKING AT WOMEN LOOKING AT WAR: A War and Justice Diary, by Victoria Amelina; translated by Daisy Gibbons and Uilleam Blacker

Three years after Vladimir Putin launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war is still raging. Whether Ukraine will prevail remains, for the moment, unknowable. In the bracing introductory pages of her remarkable book, “Looking at Women Looking at War,” the Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina acknowledges the possibility of her homeland’s defeat, quoting a passage from a letter she sent to a prominent Ukrainian human rights activist: “If we lose, I want to at least tell the story of our pursuit of justice.”

Amelina’s book began as a diary. As she embarked on a mission to gather evidence of Russian war crimes, it evolved into a kind of detective story. It may also be considered a battle cry — one cut short when she became a casualty of the war herself, her book left to be assembled by colleagues and friends.

On Feb. 24, 2022, Amelina and her 10-year-old son are in Egypt, racing to catch an early morning flight home after a weeklong vacation. As the taxi hurtles through the desert, she checks the news on her phone. The connection is poor. A single, cursory headline reaches her: “Explosions in Kyiv.”

The thundering in Ukraine’s capital continues while she remains stuck at the airport; all flights to Kyiv are canceled. Ever resourceful, Amelina manages to book a plane to Prague and enters Poland by train, leaving her son with his father in Krakow. Alone, she crosses the border into Ukraine and makes her way to Lviv, transforming a wardrobe in her top-floor apartment into a tiny bomb shelter.

All week, Ukrainians flee to Poland, seeking safety. Amelina likens the spectacle to a flock of birds filling the sky to a distant horizon. She resolves to stay put. “The quest for justice,” she writes, “has turned me from a novelist and mother into a war crimes researcher.” A thread of suspense twists through the chapters that follow. A bomb could explode at any moment.

She volunteers for an organization called Truth Hounds, which provides a crash course on international humanitarian law and guidelines one must follow when documenting war crimes. A green VW van christened “Cucumber” transports Amelina and her team to various destinations, including Balakliya, where Russians have reportedly tortured civilians, and Kapytolivka, where the Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko was presumably murdered. There Amelina digs up his diary, buried under a cherry tree in a backyard garden. She quotes excerpts from it, including this devastating sentence: “During the first days of occupation I gave up a little, then due to my half-starved state — totally.”

Diary entries are scattered throughout her narrative, as are snippets of oral history and profiles of Ukrainian women who have devoted themselves, as she has, to the resistance. A cutthroat lawyer named Evhenia receives particularly memorable descriptions: “She will learn how to stop tanks with a Kalashnikov,” Amelina tells us.

The shadow of past atrocities falls over these pages. Amelina bears the memories of family who survived the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33, also known as the Holodomor, like battle scars.

She’s got a gimlet eye for the disquieting, sometimes surreal detail: a dead frog floating in a hotel swimming pool, a string of origami angels swinging in the wind, two men playing Ping-Pong beside a bombed McDonald’s in Kharkiv. When a bomb detonates somewhere in the city, they don’t even flinch.

The missile that killed Amelina exploded in a pizza parlor 200 kilometers south of Kharkiv, on June 27, 2023. She died of her injuries several days later, at the age of 37.

In an afterword, the book’s editors estimate that her work on it was “nearly 60 percent” complete; “Looking at Women Looking at War” begins to fracture roughly two-thirds through.

The editors made the admirably audacious choice to incorporate into the narrative Amelina’s outlines and notes, including stream-of-consciousness outpourings, abbreviations and interruptions, as if language itself has been shattered by all the shelling:

What has been damag—

Anastasia called
I phoned her
I knew what it was about

Putin has called the invasion a “special military operation.” Amelina puts it differently: “It is time for everyone to call the war a war.” While her book is at times fragmentary and episodic, marked by abrupt discontinuities, the cumulative effect is powerful, eloquently testifying to the horrific consequences of this conflict.

LOOKING AT WOMEN LOOKING AT WAR: A War and Justice Diary | By Victoria Amelina | Translated by Daisy Gibbons and Uilleam Blacker | St. Martin’s | 304 pp. | $29