Man gets life sentence after directing a missile strike that killed 13 people, including writer Victoria Amelina

A resident of Kramatorsk (Ukraine)  was sentenced to life imprisonment and property confiscation by the prosecutors by prosecutors from the Donetsk Regional Prosecutor’s Office. The man was found guilty of helping the Russian military to launch a strike using the Iskander-M missile system on the Ria Pizza restaurant. 

On June 27, 2023, the devastating attack killed 13 people and wounded more than 60 people, including the well-known Ukrainian writer Victoria Amelina, who died in the hospital on July 1, 2023. 

At the time of the attack, Amelina was dining at the restaurant with fellow writers Héctor Abad and Catalina Gómez Ángel, both from Colombia, who were also injured. 

Victoria Amelina was an award-winning novelist and poet who authored the novels “The November Syndrome, or Homo Compatiens” ( “Syndrom lystopadu, abo Homo Compatiens”, Discursus, 2014) and “Dom’s Dream Kingdom” (“Dim dlya Doma”, The Old Lion Publishing House, 2017). Her texts have been translated into Polish, Czech, German, Dutch, English and recently, Spanish.

In 2022, Victoria Amelina became a member of the human rights organization Truth Hounds, and worked on documenting Russian war crimes in the de-occupied territories of the eastern, southern, and northern regions of Ukraine. 

As reported earlier, PEN Ukraine has initiated a fundraising campaign to support the New York Literary Festival established by Amelina in the Donetsk region.

RELATED: Victoria Amelina: No words are needed after a tragedy, all words slide into a whirlpool

Cover photo: Ivan Stanislavskyi

Copy editing: Tanya Mykhaylychenko