Kapytolivka is a village of low, scattered cottages, just beyond the south-eastern tip of the Ukrainian town of Izium. The last house in the village is a simple white building with a corrugated iron roof, a chimney, and a front garden planted with a vine and roses. On 22 March 2022 it would have been a pretty spot, but for the armoured personnel carrier that the Russians had parked right outside. By then, Kapytolivka had been under occupation for a fortnight. Russian soldiers had taken over the houses of those who had fled; they had looted the shop, and stolen any cars they could find.
That day, a military car pulled up at the cottage. Earlier, the Russian occupiers had arrested one of the men who lived here and his autistic son: the 49-year-old writer Volodymyr Vakulenko and 13-year-old Vitaliy, who had not spoken a word for weeks. Now, a couple of hours later, the pair were being returned to the home they shared with the author’s father, also called Volodymyr Vakulenko.
The soldiers who brought them back started searching “from attic to basement, every square centimetre of the house”, as Olena Ihnatenko, the writer’s mother, a warm, auburn-haired woman, tells me a year later. We are speaking in the village house she is borrowing from friends. Unlike her own modern apartment, also in Kapytolivka, the cottage can be heated by firewood when the power cuts out. Which it does now, abruptly silencing the cartoons Vitaliy has been watching in the next room, and making audible the dull boom of distant artillery.
Watching her son’s house turned upside down, Ihnatenko found herself thinking of the Gestapo. What were the Russians searching for? She couldn’t imagine. In Vakulenko’s room there was just his computer; shelves filled with Ukrainian literature, including copies of his own books; framed certificates on the wall marking his success in literary competitions; and, because he loved growing things, three potted plants neatly lined up on the windowsill. A knife – but that was just some souvenir. Then again, his Ukrainian-language books would have been enough to arouse suspicion; so, too, his patriotic tattoos. And then there were his mobiles, one of whose ringtones, uncompromisingly, was the popular Ukrainian anthem Putin Is a Dickhead.
Not that Vakulenko and his son were remotely threatening figures. The author of children’s stories including Daddy’s Book, a volume of jolly illustrated animal poems, was not a robust man. He had suffered a head injury in the pro-Europe Maidan protests of 2013-14 and had been injured, too, during his military service decades ago. Blue-eyed, wiry and slight, with his hair shaved at the sides and back, leaving a Cossack-style ponytail, he had become painfully thin during the six weeks since full-scale invasion, and his mother was worried about that, too. There had been little to eat – aside from the potatoes he’d dug up from the garden and the contents of the few tins he’d managed to buy in Izium before the tanks trundled in. She turned to the soldier she reckoned to be the senior officer. “Can’t you see the boy is disabled and the father’s not in good health?” she asked. “Don’t worry,” he replied. “We’ve brought them back. We won’t take them again.”
As the soldiers finally prepared to leave, Vakulenko asked for the return of his documents and phones, confiscated earlier by the five men who had showed up to arrest him. Vakulenko Sr later tells me that he reckoned, by their accents, that these men were separatists from the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic, illegally annexed from Ukraine by Russia in 2014. They had arrived in the wake of the main army echelon, and had their own base in the village. One of them, a man with a reddish beard, had the call sign Bes, Russian for “demon”.
“Don’t worry, you’ll get your phones and papers back today or tomorrow,” the soldier reassured the writer.
When Ihnatenko tells me this part of her story, she stops and says: “‘Today or tomorrow.’ I heard that phrase so many times, when I was looking for my son. ‘Today or tomorrow’ – that’s what they always said.”
The soldiers finally left the house. Vakulenko told his parents he had been taken to a “special department” set up near the village school, where he had been beaten in the groin. The soldiers had told him: “Don’t get upset.”
The next day, 23 March, slipped by. But the day after that, Ihnatenko’s ex-husband, Vakulenko Sr, returned to her flat with the news that their son had been taken again – and Vitaliy this time left at home. She ran to what she believed was the Russian command post in the village. The same man who two days ago had told Vakulenko he’d get his documents back “today or tomorrow” greeted her, smiling. “Calm down. Why are you getting so het up? He’ll be brought home either tonight or tomorrow evening. Go and take care of Vitaliy.”
Her son was not brought home that night, or the next day, or the day after. It didn’t take his parents long to figure out that the reason for his initial release was likely because the soldiers weren’t interested in young Vitaliy. As the days slid into weeks, the weeks into months, Ihnatenko became increasingly terrified. People were being arrested and released. Or sometimes not released; sometimes killed. She and Vakulenko Sr followed the trail of every rumour. She demanded answers from the military in the village. They filed a missing person report. None of the family had a car, so she hired one to reach an administrative office in Izium. She tried, too, to get to a school in the town where she had heard people were being held, but she was turned back at a checkpoint. Some newly arrived Russian military said maybe he was being held in Olenivka – a prison in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic. But that was bombed in July, killing 53 Ukrainian POWs. Others said maybe he was in prison in Belgorod, over the Russian border. The family’s lives became a cycle of hope and dread.
“Something happened to me that I cannot convey to you,” she tells me. “I had a realisation, suddenly, that he was no longer among the living. But I tried to suppress those thoughts.” She pauses. “You know, I sometimes felt like I wanted to fall upon the road and hit my head against it, just hit it and hit it, and then I would raise my head and Volodya would be standing in front of me.”
Her son never did stand in front of her again. His corpse was found six months later in a mass grave outside Izium. He had been killed by two bullets from a semi-automatic Makarov pistol. But before he was abducted for the second and last time on 24 March, he did something important: he buried a diary in the back garden, beneath a stand of cherry saplings he’d planted. Six months afterwards, on 10 September, the Russians were driven out of the Izium area by a Ukrainian counteroffensive. And a fortnight after that, on 24 September, the Ukrainian novelist Victoria Amelina dug the diary up.
* * *
The life of Amelina, a pale, slender woman in her 30s, with an intense gaze and a cascade of blond hair, changed abruptly the day the Russians mounted their full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She set aside thoughts of working on a novel. The form seemed to require at least some consistency and intelligibility, qualities that had been ripped from the world by the violence of war. As she herself would put it in a poem, “war reality” had destroyed “plot coherence”. Later, she turned to nonfiction, working on a book about those documenting war crimes, called Looking at Women Looking at War. But first she trained with an NGO called Truth Hounds to become a war crimes investigator herself, taking witness statements from people who have seen the worst things that one human can do to another.
In April 2022, Amelina was in Kyiv. Communication was all but impossible with those Ukrainians under Russian occupation, but word got out about Vakulenko’s disappearance. Amelina and fellow members of the cultural and human rights organisation PEN Ukraine started to publicise his case in any way possible. She had met Vakulenko just once, at a literary event in the city of Kramatorsk. Later, he offered her help with the book festival she was setting up in the Donetsk village of New York. (The village’s splendidly incongruous name was given by its German founders in the 19th century.) When we speak on Zoom this spring, Amelina in her high-rise apartment in Kyiv, she checks back through her correspondence with Vakulenko. “So, the interaction was good with Volodymyr,” she says, after a moment. “It was short, but at least it was good.” These days, she tells me, when she sends a message to any of her friends, she’s always careful to make it good. Just in case it’s their, or her, last.
Right after the liberation of Izium and Kapytolivka on 10 September, Amelina, determined to find out what she could about her colleague, volunteered to be part of the Truth Hounds mission headed to the area. They arrived in the region on the 20th, and four days later reached Kapytolivka.
“The delay was not because I didn’t prioritise Vakulenko – I prioritised him above everyone and everything in that mission – but on the way, in the town of Balakliya, we discovered torture chambers,” she tells me. “You talk to one witness, and he or she tells you about another one – and it’s so crucial, and so horrific that you cannot stop. You have to document it as soon as possible.”
That day, 24 September, Amelina took detailed testimony from both of Vakulenko’s parents. It was while she was talking to his father, Vakulenko Sr, that he remembered his son had buried a diary under cherry saplings. They went out the back, beyond the little garden shed. Amelina stooped to pick up a fallen acorn and put it in her pocket; when we speak in March, she has it still.
At first, Vakulenko Sr couldn’t find the diary at all. He promised to look for it, telling Amelina to return the following day. She, though, less patient and more robust than her 73-year-old companion, took the spade herself, and after a while she hit something just under the surface of the black soil. It turned out to be a plastic bag containing a waterlogged, coverless exercise book.
She called friends with jobs in museums and libraries, asking advice on how to make sure it didn’t just disintegrate. They told her to find some kind of album and place it between the pages. She replied, frustrated, “Guys, I’m in a recently deoccupied area and I don’t have any album with me – what are you even talking about?”
But Vakulenko Sr had given her a copy of a poetry book by his son, so she slipped the diary between its leaves, the pages of the printed book absorbing the moisture of the manuscript. When she and her colleagues returned to their base at the end of the day, she called one of Vakulenko’s friends and asked him if she should open the diary. “Of course,” he said. “What else can we do?”
“I couldn’t read much of it,” Amelina tells me. “I’m not an expert in handwriting. But what struck me most was the last entry in the diary. It was about spring. He saw the cranes in the sky, and he wrote that it seemed to him the birds were crying, ‘Ukraine will be well again.’”
* * *
‘I never thought that my home village would become the epicentre of the rashist occupation,” wrote Vakulenko in the opening paragraphs of his diary. The word “rashist” is a now widespread Ukrainian portmanteau, a combination of “Russian” and “fascist”, not to be given the dignity of an initial capital. “For me, with my patriotic, pro-Ukrainian views, it was extremely dangerous to find myself surrounded by the enemy.” But, he wrote, he had little choice: moving his son seemed impossible. He added: “You can get used to anything; what matters is what sort of person you are left at the end of it.”
To call Vakulenko’s notebook a diary gives, perhaps, a slightly false impression. Rather than minutely documenting the events of each day, the exercise book contains 36 pages of closely handwritten, dated notes, about 5,000 words in total. In a postscript he referred to them as scribbles, a set of recollections of what he had experienced during the invasion. He wanted them made public: there’s an entry in which he says he hopes they will eventually find their way to the Ukrainian authorities. The last full entry is marked 20 March, so the final postscript must have been written either then or a day or two later, just before he was taken.
The manuscript is now in the Kharkiv Literary Museum, and the text of the diary has been recently published in Ukraine, with a foreword by Amelina. The notes offer a unique, granular sense of the terrors of occupation. With its many excisions and corrections, the manuscript can be confusing. But then, as Amelina put it in her poem, war has a way of destroying coherence.
In the days after the start of the full-scale invasion, bombs and rockets – which were pounding Kharkiv, the regional capital to the north, and Izium – inched closer and closer, the diary tells us. After the first attacks, the electricity supply was cut, the internet started to fail and mobile phone reception all but disappeared. “Near my home village,” wrote Vakulenko, “four buildings were like they’d never existed – just a huge crater and bricks shattered into stone shards … a lonely wall was left behind at the beginning of the street, and at its end lay a crater – a ruptured water-supply pipe, where a dribble of water oozed out, like blood from the severed veins of the residential neighbourhood.” His parents sheltered in basements at night. He himself stayed on the ground floor at home, sleeping with his son in the corridor, as far as possible from windows. Vitaliy stopped speaking. “I came to understand that all these explosions, the Grad rockets hailing down on us, the bombings, and the new commands of the genre ‘Get the f-ck down!’ also stirred his autistic psyche,” he wrote.
In this country at war since 2014, Vakulenko had long worked as a volunteer, collecting aid for the armed forces of Ukraine. He now started fundraising for care packages for the infantry stationed in Izium. To buy and deliver these supplies – cigarettes, flu medicine, socks, wet wipes, sanitary towels to use as moisture-absorbing insoles – he and Vitaliy, from whom he was barely ever parted, needed to take a round trip from Kapytolivka, on foot, of 20km or so. People knew him by sight: strangers came up to him and gave him cigarettes or food to deliver. In the meantime, shops were closing; those that were open still had long queues. ATMs stopped issuing money. It was like the Soviet era, Vakulenko wrote: even if you had money, there was nothing to spend it on.
The nightly bombings opened up new vistas in Izium as buildings were destroyed. The 140-year-old school was empty, its windows blown out. Cars were flattened. In the park, trees were stripped of leaves or scythed in half by the explosions. One day, the bombings started in the daytime, while he and Vitaliy were there in the town. They took shelter for a while, then set out for home, but Russian planes started circling and a second wave came. “Vitalka and I had practised the command, ‘Get the eff down!’ well. Children with his autistic makeup cannot understand why one is not allowed to lie prone in the dirt one minute, and the next it’s the opposite,” he wrote. “Actually, Vitalik was the one who made the positives, as reaction to indirect fire became a fun exercise for him. In fact, for someone in my position this was a hefty plus: for me the main thing was that the child didn’t get frightened.”
Then, in the afternoon of 7 March, a line of tanks, the Russian tricolor flying from the first, lumbered into his village, rattling the windows in the cottage and churning the road into mud. At first he thought the Russians must be lost, or they’d move on, or that somehow it wasn’t real. But it was real. With what turned out to be the last breath of mobile signal, he sent a message to his ex-wife, Vitaliy’s mother, who lives outside the area and who uses a wheelchair, letting her know that they were now under occupation.
Then the armoured personnel carrier halted outside the house. “Any talk about heroism, like stopping an APC, etc – that’s for big cities,” he wrote. “We’re a small village, where the number of patriotic people you could bring together was two, three people max. I had known this for a long time, which is why I lived my life as a hermit.”
Roadblocks were put up every 100 metres. “They constantly frisked us, did shakedowns of even empty bags. The latter really set me off: I knew that my nerves could not handle this sort of humiliation.” The Russian soldiers, he wrote, looked hungry and disoriented, their ration packs out of date. They pillaged alcohol from the shop and took villagers’ cars; on the second night they started breaking into empty houses and stealing food. They set up a field camp and a kind of barracks in the semi-abandoned agricultural machinery agency on the edge of the village. One morning, the Vakulenkos and their neighbours were warming themselves around a bonfire when a group of six occupiers came up to join them. They told the villagers they had come to build a “different Ukraine”. “Where are you going to go now?” the soldiers asked. “You won’t be let into Russia.” As if any of us would want to go to Russia, thought Vakulenko. He slipped away; the conversation was unbearable. His father – elderly, infirm, not perceived as a threat to the Russians – became “negotiator” in these occasional interactions.
In the absence of information or news from unoccupied Ukraine – the internet blocked and phone signal nonexistent – Vakulenko noted how rumours started spreading from the soldiers to the villagers; some of the older inhabitants were wistful about the old Soviet days, anyway. The Russians whipped up fear that if the Ukrainian armed forces were to stage a counterattack, the whole village would be destroyed. The fence by the Vakulenko house had been painted with the slogan “Glory to the heroes” in Ukrainian blue and yellow. The occupiers defaced it to “Salo to the zeroes” – salo being the finely sliced lard that’s traditionally served with Ukrainian borscht.
March stayed bitterly cold. Vakulenko and his family got hungrier, though basic food parcels were handed out in the second week. His mother managed to get to them for a brief visit – afraid, she fumbled to open the wicket gate and a soldier moved in to help her. Vakulenko wrote that he suspected some of the girls in the village were sleeping with the Russians for food. He noted a pattern that he’d seen since 2014: the invaders destroy homes and livelihoods, then pose as benevolent. Under those circumstances, there are some who collaborate and inform.
“Sometimes, dropping off for an hour or two, I dream,” he wrote in the diary’s last entry. “During the first period of occupation I dreamed of numbers, old calendars, friends. I also dreamed of our lads fighting, dreamed I was hugging them, greeting them. I am scared to think of how they are. During the first days of occupation I gave up a little, then due to my half-starved state, totally. Now I’ve pulled myself together, even raking the garden and digging up potatoes to take into the house.”
But he had already foreseen that his pro-Ukrainian views would get him arrested. “I knew that sooner or later they would turn me in, and there were plenty of snitches,” he wrote.
He was right. His father’s war crimes testimony, as recorded by Amelina, states that on 24 March, a van pulled up at the house. It was painted with the letter Z, symbol of the Russian army. Its side door was missing. A slim soldier carrying a gun stepped out of it. The soldier hustled the author into the van, which drove off in the direction of Izium. Vakulenko never came home.
* * *
Volodymyr Vakulenko has two graves. When I talk to his father among the cherry trees, which are budding once more in April, he tells me that his son’s corpse was found not far from the railway lines near Izium station, on 12 May last year. He was then buried – unbeknown to his family, who would still be searching for him for months to come – in the mass graves on the edge of the town. These graves of occupation, more than 400 of them, including a single pit containing the bodies of more than 20 Ukrainian soldiers, were exhumed by the Ukrainian authorities on 16 September, a week after the liberation. Those who were there say they will not easily forget the odour of death.
Six months after the exhumations, when I visit, it remains an eerie and unsettling spot. The graves are set in a pine wood, just outside one of the regular town cemeteries. The plain wooden crosses, plunged into the sandy soil, are still standing. Some have names scratched on to them. Most are simply marked with a number. In front of each cross is an unfilled pit where, until recently, rested a body. An open, empty coffin, lined with bright fabric, lies half in, half out of one of them. Close by – far too close by, it feels – Russian troops excavated deep hollows in the soft ground to shelter their tanks, and dug out semi-underground living quarters. The graves, the tank places, the improvised dwellings – they all seem only just to have been vacated. One of the tank-hollows is filled with forensic suits, latex gloves and a few body bags, discarded by those who came to dig out the corpses of their compatriots.
Vakulenko’s empty grave, among the pines and the birdsong, is marked by cross number 319. When it was exhumed with the rest, his corpse was misidentified as that of a woman, despite cemetery documentation that correctly gave his surname. Eventually, in November, journalists traced a photograph of his body taken at the time of its discovery in May: as soon as Ihnatenko saw it, all her lingering hopes were dashed. Not long after, the body was formally identified using a DNA sample given by his father.
Vakulenko was reburied one shivering December day in the city of Kharkiv, two hours’ drive north, in a peaceful, dignified urban plot among the graves of fellow artists. When I ask Ihnatenko why he is so far from his family in Kapytolivka, she tells me, “People betrayed him here. I wouldn’t even think of burying him here.” His parents believe he was turned in. Even after Vakulenko’s disappearance, a man from the village, who has a drug addiction, arrived at the door looking for her son, bringing another group of soldiers, this time Chechens, telling them: “Here is your nationalist.”
“Yes, he was a drug addict, but he was also a real collaborator,” says Ihnatenko of the local man. “But he is walking free, and no one does anything to him. That’s it – such is justice … It is very difficult to understand this. Perhaps these are matters that are too high for us.”
* * *
The war itself is a crime, an act of aggression under international law. But within this overarching crime there are tens of thousands of other crimes, whose evidence is being uncovered and documented. According to Oleksandra Matviichuk, the human rights defender who, with her Kyiv-based organisation Centre for Civil Liberties, won the 2022 Nobel peace prize, 41,000 war crimes have been reported so far.
“Russia has introduced a reign of terror on the occupied territories, to keep them under control,” she says. “Occupation is not a matter of exchanging the flag of one state for that of another. Occupation brings torture, deportation, forced adoption, denial of identity, filtration camps, mass graves.” The totality of this cruelty seems impossible to comprehend, its scale beyond the capabilities of a nation’s judicial system.
Zoom in, though, and the story of each individual crime contains pains and griefs that belong to it alone. It is unclear, as yet, precisely what impelled the occupiers to take and kill Vakulenko. But his unapologetic, unconcealed adherence to an idea of Ukraine, his shelves of Ukrainian-language books, his patriotic tattoos, his refusal to speak Russian: all of this likely made him a target for the occupiers.
At the same time, amid the muddy, morally ugly world of occupation, amid the terror of it, the desperation and hunger, Vakulenko would not be the first or last to have been betrayed by a neighbour – if that is indeed what happened, as his family suspects. Under occupation, outright collaboration slides into casual treachery and the working out of petty grudges. As for the precise circumstances of his killing, Truth Hounds and Ukrainian law enforcement agencies are continuing to investigate the case.
In Kapytolivka this spring, even if the trauma wrought by occupation runs deep, the outward signs of it are gradually being eradicated. Vakulenko Sr and his brother, who lives next door, have rebuilt the fence that the Russian armoured personnel carrier smashed through when it left the village; they have used planks from empty crates of Soviet-era explosives, left behind by the occupiers. Ihnatenko, wiping away the tears that she has been trying to hold back for some time, gives me a copy of Vakulenko’s Daddy’s Book, which is dedicated both to Vitaliy, for whom she is now caring, and to the writer’s much older son Vladyslav, who is now living in Poland with his family after a traumatic escape from the occupiers via Russia and Belarus.
Ihnatenko sends me to meet Yulia Kalulia-Danyliuk, a friend of Vakulenko’s, who runs the village children’s library, attached to the preschool. Kalulia-Danyliuk shows me some of Vakulenko’s books – a set of fairytales, a collection of children’s poems in braille, a volume of poems about Cossacks. She first got to know Vakulenko in about 2015, when he moved back to his home village with Vitaliy after the end of his marriage. “Not everyone got his writing,” she tells me. “But when I read his poems, I thought: this is unusual, the writing is strange and allusive. He used unusual words, invented words. I thought he was very smart.” She adds: “He really loved Ukraine. He was trying to prove to everyone here that we should build our own future as a country.”
It was only in December that Kalulia-Danyliuk was able to return to this, her workplace, after the area had been cleared of mines. She shows me a video she took on her phone of what greeted her when she stepped inside. Library books had been used to block up the windows – thankfully, she says, as that saved them from destruction. Soldiers had lit campfires inside the building. Vodka bottles and empty ration packs were strewn across the floor. The TV had gone. Pages of books on Ukrainian culture had been used as toilet paper and the lavatory itself was blocked up with socks and other clothing. Children’s dressing-up costumes had been defecated on. A mirror had been scrawled with the letter Z. “I didn’t want to clean it,” she says of the looking glass, “in case I lost the hatred.” She was heartbroken by the chaos, the filth and the destruction: “I had invested my soul, my time, my own money in this place,” she says. “You know, when I left work for the last time before the invasion, I lined a bin with a fresh rubbish bag. When I came back after the liberation, it was still there, unused.”
Things are different now. The main room of the library smells of fresh paint, in pistachio green, the shelves are stocked with new children’s books and there’s a portrait of Vakulenko above them. There are bright blue beanbags on the floor and light floods in through brand new windows. The date Vakulenko is thought to have bured his diary, 23 March, has been named his memory-day in the village. This year it was marked by an event here in the library, with drawings and stories and games for the village children. “I wanted it like this,” Amelina, who co-organised the day, tells me this spring. “I wanted to commemorate him not by some pathetic speeches and crying, but by making sure the children in his village have some connections to books and writers again.”
As I leave Kapytolivka, past the budding apricot trees that line the lanes, I look up and see a sedge of cranes flying overhead. I want to believe they are the same birds that Vakulenko saw a year ago: the birds that brought him hope.
• On the evening of Tuesday 27 June, the day I finished writing this article, the Russian military targeted a pizza restaurant in the eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. More than 60 people were injured and 13 killed in the cruise missile attack, among them 14-year-old twin girls. Victoria Amelina was there, accompanying a delegation of Colombian writers. Though the others at her table walked away unharmed, Amelina was severely injured, and she died on 1 July. Her husband, son and parents survive her. This article was her idea and she was instrumental in making it happen; in working on it, we became friends. It is dedicated, in love and admiration, to her memory. CH
