The war is when you can no longer follow all news and cry about all neighbors who died instead of you a couple of miles away [..] Still, I want to no… - Victoria Amelina

Terrified that the pages of the diary [of Volodymyr Vakulenko] were wet and might not survive, she gave it to the Kharkiv Literary Museum. That experience led her to focus on what she called "cultural war crimes".
On her phone she showed me photos of bullet holes in library walls in Kherson. "It's important to see for yourself and write down the stories," she said. "The way you see it from afar is very different to on the ground."

[On being chosen to represent Lviv in a Russian language contest aged 15] At the contest in Moscow I met kids from all those countries Russia would later try to invade or assimilate: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Moldova. The Russian Federation invested a lot of money in raising children like us from the "former Soviet republics" as Russians. They probably invested more in us than they did in the education of children in rural Russia: those who were already conquered didn't need to be tempted with summer camps and excursions to the Red Square. Hopefully I will have turned out to be one of the worst investments of the Russian Federation.

So maybe it is time to shift the debate from whether the world should 'forgive' Russian imperial art and literature, to how to prevent one of Europe’s cultures from becoming another Executed Renaissance.
I was never a fan of Cancel Culture. But maybe the Execute Culture that Russians have repeatedly practiced on free Ukrainians is something the world would like to stop before it’s too late again.