by Victoria Amelina<\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n\nWhen Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country\u2019s literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become LOOKING AT WOMEN LOOKING AT WAR<\/i>. On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. Read an excerpt below.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n\nHer call sign as a war crimes researcher at Truth Hounds is Casanova. She seems about my age, and I\u2019m thirty- seven. She, too, has a son, long hair, and an ambition to write a book. Yet while I quit my day job and did write my novels, Casanova has committed herself to defending human rights and then, since 2014, to researching war crimes. Over the years, many quit the field, switching to less stressful ways of pursuing justice, but not Casanova.<\/span><\/p>\nShe asked me not to use her real name in the book for safety reasons. Casanova joined missions in the war-torn Donetsk region in 2014 and the occupied Crimea peninsula in 2018. Who knows where she steers next to pursue the ideals of justice and human rights? If she ever gets caught by one of the war criminals she is helping to find and convict, it\u2019s certainly better if they don\u2019t know she is a key researcher at Truth Hounds.<\/span><\/p>\nCasanova is my reason for writing this book: I wanted to write about her. At first, it disappointed me when she asked if she could remain anonymous. I wondered if her mannish call sign, Casanova, would work well for portraying her, a pretty young woman driving minivans, to which she gives cute nicknames, into the war zone. Her old white Mercedes Vito is Birdy, and she is Casanova. However, she told me a story that made me see her call sign differently.<\/span><\/p>\nIt was the end of 2021, the seventh year of the Russian war against Ukraine, when Casanova decided to quit her job as a war crimes researcher. Dozens of missions to the front line and temporarily occupied territories hadn\u2019t led to a single court hearing at the Hague. She resolved not to think about the lack of final results\u2014criminals on the court bench. She kept doing her job well, documenting new war crimes, writing reports, taking pictures of the shell holes, and recording videos of the atrocities in the east of Ukraine. She didn\u2019t lose her faith in justice or human rights, no. She felt it was time for a change. Still, the choice wasn\u2019t easy; the Truth Hounds team had become her family, and pursuing justice in the Russian-Ukrainian war had kept Casanova going for the past seven years. Yet she planned a brave new life for herself by the beginning of 2022: Casanova and her husband would buy a house and plot of land in Central Ukraine, grow a beautiful garden around it, and live there in the house with the beautiful garden happily ever after.<\/span><\/p>\nCasanova already knows what kind of trees she\u2019d have there: apple, apricot, and cherry trees. Those grow best on Ukrainian soil, and the climate is most appropriate. She would even enroll in a master\u2019s program at the Kharkiv National Agrarian University to be as good a farmer as she is a war crimes researcher. Her small family would make a living by selling the fruit and inviting people from busy cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv to live their village dream as green tourists\u2014a simple, happy life.<\/span><\/p>\nShe tells me the story, and the name Casanova suddenly has a different meaning: <\/span>casa<\/span><\/i> means \u201chouse\u201d and <\/span>nova<\/span><\/i> is \u201cnew\u201d in Portuguese.<\/span><\/p>\nThe garden around the future house, around the <\/span>casa nova<\/span><\/i>, was all well planned, or at least well dreamed. In March 2022, Casanova was going to travel to the Poltava region of Ukraine and find a house with a plot to buy near Myrhorod, in the heart of Ukraine, a canonical Ukrainian town mythologized by Mykola Hohol.<\/span><\/p>\nSo Casanova quits her job in war crimes research, celebrates New Year in Kharkiv, and drives Birdy to the war zone in the east of Ukraine on the first day of 2022. Her friends volunteer each winter season to bring Christmas presents and entertain kids in schools along the front line. The Kharkiv-based team calls themselves St. Nicholas\u2019s Deer, and Casanova is usually their driver. Although playing with kids isn\u2019t easy for her, she, like the rest of the team, dons funny deer\u2019s horns and watches the fun from the side, so she witnesses not only tragedy in the war zone but joy too. She started 2022 by driving the team to Stanytsia Luhanska, the town where Russian forces shelled one of the schools in 2014 and began the escalation in 2022, which would hit Fairy Tale kindergarten soon, on February 17.<\/span><\/p>\nBecause of the shelling, several teens from the nearby village in the Luhansk region, Vrubivka, asked St. Nicholas\u2019s Deer to evacuate them; their parents didn\u2019t want to leave but granted their permission for the kids to go. The team booked accommodation in the Carpathian Mountains. Casanova brings them to Kharkiv but won\u2019t drive them farther west; she feels that she cannot go far from Kharkiv now. Unlike me, she has a real plan if Russian forces invade. Throughout February 2022, while I packed my swimming suits and summer dresses for a vacation in Egypt, Casanova bought extra gasoline and studied evacuation routes from Kharkiv to Svitlovodsk. In Svitlovodsk, her Kharkiv friends and their Polish partners set up a shelter in case the full-scale invasion began. They stocked plastic canisters with fuel, a lot of it. Casanova had sixty liters waiting on the balcony in her Kharkiv apartment so that she would be ready to start immediately.<\/span><\/p>\nThe Truth Hounds prepared themselves for the war too. Casanova\u2019s ex-boss, the executive director of Truth Hounds, Roman Avramenko, was in the Luhansk region to train the prosecutors there in war crimes research when he received a call from Brussels: leave the Luhansk region immediately. He did, without much hurry. But such warnings came from everywhere, and all eventually appeared to be wrong. So it was only on the evening of February 23, 2022, that Roman finally wrote on the Truth Hounds work chat the two words meaning almost the highest level of danger: \u201cCode orange.\u201d At that moment, everyone on the team knew what to do, how and where to move. Casanova left the chat at the end of 2021, so she didn\u2019t receive that message. She was at her home in Kharkiv.<\/span><\/p>\nDespite the dream of settling near Myrhorod, Casanova is all about the road. She loves to drive minivans that can carry a team of war crimes researchers or volunteers. The work in human rights defense isn\u2019t exactly a gold mine, so the minivans she drives are pretty old. Each of them gets a name\u2014or maybe a call sign. If they stall, she talks them into keeping going and not letting the team get stuck in danger. Their names are no secret: the green Volkswagen is Cucumber, the yellow one\u2019s Fishy; these are corporate vehicles shared by the Truth Hounds team. Casanova\u2019s own minivan is a white Mercedes Vito, and she has named it Birdy. When the attack on Kharkiv started on February 24, 2022, Casanova executed her tasks according to the evacuation plan, carrying passengers with her Birdy.<\/span><\/p>\nShe\u2019d evacuate as many as possible and get back to researching war crimes. Everyone in war crimes research in the region is all too familiar with Russian tactics; they see the flood of horrible war crimes coming their way.<\/span><\/p>\nHer plan for a new home with a garden will have to wait. Near Poltava, where she was going to buy a new house, Casanova stops at a gas station and messages Roman Avramenko at Truth Hounds, the organization she left at the end of 2021 to start a new life.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cAny vacancies?\u201d she inquires with bitter irony.<\/span><\/p>\n\u201cWell, of course. What would you like to do?\u201d Roman replies. On February 27, she posts on her Facebook page: \u201cDear all, I am alive and well, my family is safe. Obviously, I\u2019m back to volunteering and \u2018work.\u2019 Well, you got it. Please send me information about the shelling of civilians in the Kharkiv region (in personal messages only).\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nCasanova doesn\u2019t speak Portuguese. And the dream about the house and the garden appeared, of course, long after Casanova got her call sign. Still, it seems to me that it\u2019s this idyllic Ukrainian vision of a house surrounded by cherry trees, <\/span>casa nova<\/span><\/i>, that she is protecting by remaining incognito. And even when Casanova begins to speak again to the eyewitnesses and war crimes survivors, I will keep seeing her \u201cnew home\u201d as if shining through the reality of destruction, injustice, and human pain.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.thehistoryreader.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/03\/200129325.jpg\")
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When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Victoria Amelina was busy writing a novel, taking part in the country\u2019s literary scene, and parenting her son. Now she became someone new: a war crimes researcher and the chronicler of extraordinary women like herself who joined the resistance. She photographed the ruins of schools and cultural centers; she recorded the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses to atrocities. And she slowly turned back into a storyteller, writing what would become LOOKING AT WOMEN LOOKING AT WAR<\/i>. On the evening of June 27th, 2023, Amelina and three international writers stopped for dinner in the embattled Donetsk region. When a Russian cruise missile hit the restaurant, Amelina suffered grievous head injuries, and lost consciousness. She died on July 1st. She was thirty-seven. She left behind an incredible account of the ravages of war and the cost of resistance. Read an excerpt below.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n Her call sign as a war crimes researcher at Truth Hounds is Casanova. She seems about my age, and I\u2019m thirty- seven. She, too, has a son, long hair, and an ambition to write a book. Yet while I quit my day job and did write my novels, Casanova has committed herself to defending human rights and then, since 2014, to researching war crimes. Over the years, many quit the field, switching to less stressful ways of pursuing justice, but not Casanova.<\/span><\/p>\n She asked me not to use her real name in the book for safety reasons. Casanova joined missions in the war-torn Donetsk region in 2014 and the occupied Crimea peninsula in 2018. Who knows where she steers next to pursue the ideals of justice and human rights? If she ever gets caught by one of the war criminals she is helping to find and convict, it\u2019s certainly better if they don\u2019t know she is a key researcher at Truth Hounds.<\/span><\/p>\n Casanova is my reason for writing this book: I wanted to write about her. At first, it disappointed me when she asked if she could remain anonymous. I wondered if her mannish call sign, Casanova, would work well for portraying her, a pretty young woman driving minivans, to which she gives cute nicknames, into the war zone. Her old white Mercedes Vito is Birdy, and she is Casanova. However, she told me a story that made me see her call sign differently.<\/span><\/p>\n It was the end of 2021, the seventh year of the Russian war against Ukraine, when Casanova decided to quit her job as a war crimes researcher. Dozens of missions to the front line and temporarily occupied territories hadn\u2019t led to a single court hearing at the Hague. She resolved not to think about the lack of final results\u2014criminals on the court bench. She kept doing her job well, documenting new war crimes, writing reports, taking pictures of the shell holes, and recording videos of the atrocities in the east of Ukraine. She didn\u2019t lose her faith in justice or human rights, no. She felt it was time for a change. Still, the choice wasn\u2019t easy; the Truth Hounds team had become her family, and pursuing justice in the Russian-Ukrainian war had kept Casanova going for the past seven years. Yet she planned a brave new life for herself by the beginning of 2022: Casanova and her husband would buy a house and plot of land in Central Ukraine, grow a beautiful garden around it, and live there in the house with the beautiful garden happily ever after.<\/span><\/p>\n Casanova already knows what kind of trees she\u2019d have there: apple, apricot, and cherry trees. Those grow best on Ukrainian soil, and the climate is most appropriate. She would even enroll in a master\u2019s program at the Kharkiv National Agrarian University to be as good a farmer as she is a war crimes researcher. Her small family would make a living by selling the fruit and inviting people from busy cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv to live their village dream as green tourists\u2014a simple, happy life.<\/span><\/p>\n She tells me the story, and the name Casanova suddenly has a different meaning: <\/span>casa<\/span><\/i> means \u201chouse\u201d and <\/span>nova<\/span><\/i> is \u201cnew\u201d in Portuguese.<\/span><\/p>\n The garden around the future house, around the <\/span>casa nova<\/span><\/i>, was all well planned, or at least well dreamed. In March 2022, Casanova was going to travel to the Poltava region of Ukraine and find a house with a plot to buy near Myrhorod, in the heart of Ukraine, a canonical Ukrainian town mythologized by Mykola Hohol.<\/span><\/p>\n So Casanova quits her job in war crimes research, celebrates New Year in Kharkiv, and drives Birdy to the war zone in the east of Ukraine on the first day of 2022. Her friends volunteer each winter season to bring Christmas presents and entertain kids in schools along the front line. The Kharkiv-based team calls themselves St. Nicholas\u2019s Deer, and Casanova is usually their driver. Although playing with kids isn\u2019t easy for her, she, like the rest of the team, dons funny deer\u2019s horns and watches the fun from the side, so she witnesses not only tragedy in the war zone but joy too. She started 2022 by driving the team to Stanytsia Luhanska, the town where Russian forces shelled one of the schools in 2014 and began the escalation in 2022, which would hit Fairy Tale kindergarten soon, on February 17.<\/span><\/p>\n Because of the shelling, several teens from the nearby village in the Luhansk region, Vrubivka, asked St. Nicholas\u2019s Deer to evacuate them; their parents didn\u2019t want to leave but granted their permission for the kids to go. The team booked accommodation in the Carpathian Mountains. Casanova brings them to Kharkiv but won\u2019t drive them farther west; she feels that she cannot go far from Kharkiv now. Unlike me, she has a real plan if Russian forces invade. Throughout February 2022, while I packed my swimming suits and summer dresses for a vacation in Egypt, Casanova bought extra gasoline and studied evacuation routes from Kharkiv to Svitlovodsk. In Svitlovodsk, her Kharkiv friends and their Polish partners set up a shelter in case the full-scale invasion began. They stocked plastic canisters with fuel, a lot of it. Casanova had sixty liters waiting on the balcony in her Kharkiv apartment so that she would be ready to start immediately.<\/span><\/p>\n The Truth Hounds prepared themselves for the war too. Casanova\u2019s ex-boss, the executive director of Truth Hounds, Roman Avramenko, was in the Luhansk region to train the prosecutors there in war crimes research when he received a call from Brussels: leave the Luhansk region immediately. He did, without much hurry. But such warnings came from everywhere, and all eventually appeared to be wrong. So it was only on the evening of February 23, 2022, that Roman finally wrote on the Truth Hounds work chat the two words meaning almost the highest level of danger: \u201cCode orange.\u201d At that moment, everyone on the team knew what to do, how and where to move. Casanova left the chat at the end of 2021, so she didn\u2019t receive that message. She was at her home in Kharkiv.<\/span><\/p>\n Despite the dream of settling near Myrhorod, Casanova is all about the road. She loves to drive minivans that can carry a team of war crimes researchers or volunteers. The work in human rights defense isn\u2019t exactly a gold mine, so the minivans she drives are pretty old. Each of them gets a name\u2014or maybe a call sign. If they stall, she talks them into keeping going and not letting the team get stuck in danger. Their names are no secret: the green Volkswagen is Cucumber, the yellow one\u2019s Fishy; these are corporate vehicles shared by the Truth Hounds team. Casanova\u2019s own minivan is a white Mercedes Vito, and she has named it Birdy. When the attack on Kharkiv started on February 24, 2022, Casanova executed her tasks according to the evacuation plan, carrying passengers with her Birdy.<\/span><\/p>\n She\u2019d evacuate as many as possible and get back to researching war crimes. Everyone in war crimes research in the region is all too familiar with Russian tactics; they see the flood of horrible war crimes coming their way.<\/span><\/p>\n Her plan for a new home with a garden will have to wait. Near Poltava, where she was going to buy a new house, Casanova stops at a gas station and messages Roman Avramenko at Truth Hounds, the organization she left at the end of 2021 to start a new life.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cAny vacancies?\u201d she inquires with bitter irony.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cWell, of course. What would you like to do?\u201d Roman replies. On February 27, she posts on her Facebook page: \u201cDear all, I am alive and well, my family is safe. Obviously, I\u2019m back to volunteering and \u2018work.\u2019 Well, you got it. Please send me information about the shelling of civilians in the Kharkiv region (in personal messages only).\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Casanova doesn\u2019t speak Portuguese. And the dream about the house and the garden appeared, of course, long after Casanova got her call sign. Still, it seems to me that it\u2019s this idyllic Ukrainian vision of a house surrounded by cherry trees, <\/span>casa nova<\/span><\/i>, that she is protecting by remaining incognito. And even when Casanova begins to speak again to the eyewitnesses and war crimes survivors, I will keep seeing her \u201cnew home\u201d as if shining through the reality of destruction, injustice, and human pain.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>\n\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n