Until a few days ago, I had no idea what an Iskander ballistic missile was. I don’t actually know anything about guns, I was classified as a miss in military service and I’ve never fired a gun in my life. You could say I’m the pinnacle of a pacifist: a coward. But since the missile that killed writer Victoria Amelina before me was a Russian Iskander missile, I felt compelled to find out what kind of weapon it was. This Russian toy initially costs about three million dollars, weighs four and a half tons, can be launched from a distance of about 500 kilometers, travels at supersonic speeds (more than two thousand meters per second) and is so accurate that it has error tolerance at the target in the Radius no more than five meters. And yes, this extremely accurate weapon exploded about ten meters from us.
Why so much cruelty, so much effort, so much aim to attack a simple restaurant? The Russian intelligence services, if you could read their disinformation and lie-spreading services, declared first that it wasn’t them, it was the Ukrainian army; later they said Ria’s pizzeria had been attacked by mistake; They later corrected, arguing that the target was legitimate because the second floor of that restaurant “was a temporary deployment post for commanders of the 56th Motorized Infantry Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” It should be noted that the restaurant did not have a second floor and no brigade worked on it. Every foreign correspondent who has been to the city of Kramatorsk has eaten there and knows that the place is anything but a military post (I mean, was). They went there, yes, soldiers on their days off who met their families there. But it was a regular gathering place especially for the residents of Kramatorsk, a town that had a population of 200,000 at the start of the Russian invasion and is now down to around 80,000. So why and for what purpose so much effort and so much precision for a civilian target? Victoria told us about a different scenario: as a lesson and a punishment for a population that doesn’t want to be Russian or don’t want to welcome Russians with open arms.
Relatives and friends of Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina at her funeral this Tuesday in Kiev, Ukraine.Luis De Vega Hernández
What were we doing in Kramatorsk, 40 kilometers from the front, and in this restaurant? The story needs to be told from the beginning, so I’ll take two paragraphs of your time. In reality, Sergio Jaramillo (High Peace Commissioner and former Colombian Deputy Defense Minister) and I had traveled to Kiev at the invitation of the Book Fair: I wanted to autograph copies of a novel of mine that had been published in Ukrainian; Sergio to introduce the Hold on Ukraine! campaign. As I was also part of this campaign from the beginning and tried to win over my colleagues from Latin America for this initiative, I joined the presentation of our movement in favor of Ukraine. The Ukrainian Nobel Prize winner Oleksandra Matviichuk took part in the presentation; the President of the Pen Club of Ukraine Volodimir Yermolenko; the Colombian journalist Catalina Gómez as presenter; and poor Victoria Amelina. i was next to her
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Our presentation included a video that ended with Paquito D’Rivera playing the Ukrainian anthem on the clarinet. That moved the numerous visitors to the fair to tears. That was on Saturday. The plan was to return to Poland on Monday, but it occurred to Sergio and Catalina that we should continue our campaign and also document more closely the horrors and crimes committed by the Russians. The coward that I am made several excuses as to why I didn’t go, but all my objections were met by my friends. At a dinner with Victoria on Sunday, she was so taken with our South American solidarity that she said she wanted to accompany us to Donetsk herself. He would make one last trip before going to France on a one-year fellowship to finish his book on Russia’s war crimes. The next day, Monday, (I didn’t want to go and Victoria didn’t want to) we got up early to cover the 550-kilometer highway from Kiev to Kramatorsk in nine hours.
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Amelina’s company was instrumental in learning about the horrors of war and the atrocities committed by the Russian army both in the first weeks of the invasion and in the year that followed. He led us to the house from which the Russians kidnapped the poet Volodymyr Vakulenko in order to later torture him, shoot him twice and bury him in a mass grave like any other Jew from the 40s. With my obsession with the Holocaust, I contributed my own. I had us stop on the outskirts of Kharkiv to see a memorial honoring more than 15,000 Jewish victims who were murdered and buried in mass graves. In his campaign to “denazify” Ukraine, the most Hitler-like president since 1945, Putin, destroyed the menorah that marked the site of the Nazi crime.
We saw and interviewed officers and soldiers of the Ukrainian army. You have nothing in common with Nazis, I can assure you. If they have one flaw, it’s that they’re still too Soviet an army, that is, paranoid (which is understandable in a war) and thick-skinned and ineffective (which is very damaging in a war). We met a charming young soldier, Amelina’s friend, with an always seraphic smile, who explained that although he had always been a staunch pacifist, he was also sure that Putin and the invaders only use and understand one language: that of violence . Dialogue and diplomacy have failed. Like it or not, the only alternative we have today is to take up arms against evil.
A woman hugs the coffin of Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina at her funeral this Tuesday in Kiev, Ukraine.Luis De Vega Hernández
For the past year, Victoria had turned away from fiction and devoted herself to finding and documenting in detail the war crimes committed by the aggressors. There is one war crime she can no longer personally document: the one that was committed with her. I will spend the next few months writing about this heinous crime and recounting it in length and detail, beyond the propaganda and lies of the Russians. It is something I owe to justice in the abstract and to justice that must one day be committed for this cruel crime against a great and very brave colleague, a writer my daughter’s age, who in turn leaves behind a man orphaned. 10 year old boy I owe it to this boy, at least, that in another ten years he will know exactly how his brave, brilliant and lovely mother was killed.
For now, I’ll just tell you the last moment Victoria Amelina was conscious. I stood in front of her on the restaurant terrace. Since there was Prohibition, Victoria had ordered a non-alcoholic beer. Sergio Jaramillo had filled me a glass with ice and something similar to apple juice. Victoria looked at my glass, “It looks like whiskey,” she said, smiling. At that moment Iskander, Hell, fell on us from the sky. Now Victoria has an address in heaven. Not in the Christian or Muslim sense, no. In this immaterial and mental heaven, very human, that we call memory.
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