In fact, we did not really think much about what to take with us. We thought that we would go to the village, not a great distance from Kyiv, and would return quite soon. I think this is always the case at the start of a war. 24 March 2022 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.” Något som mer berörs det vi kan kalla hedniska traditioner som ännu lever kvar i Ukraina. Som till exempel att vid Påsk göra fint vid graven och ta med sig mat och prata och minnas de döda vid graven. Despite the destruction, morale remains good, he says. His 25-year-old daughter recently returned to Kyiv from London to join her brother, and is now looking for a job. We have a small garden and we hope that we can plant potatoes and carrots for ourselves. For us it is a hobby, but what kind of hobby can you have during a war? If the Ukrainian army manages to drive the Russian military away from our region, we will try to return to Lazarevka, to live a normal life again. Although the term "normal life" now seems but a myth, an illusion. In actuality, there can be no normal life for my generation now. Every war leaves a deep wound in the soul of a person. It remains a part of life even when the war it

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.

Summary

As a young man, Andrey Kurkov travelled round the USSR – on trains, riverboats and in lorries he’d hitched a lift on – interviewing former Soviet bureaucrats. He’d read a copy of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s prohibited The Gulag Archipelago and wanted to know more about the gulag itself. One judge he met owned up to signing 3,000 death warrants for people sentenced without trial. The experience was a lesson to Kurkov about the suppression of memory and truth: members of his own family had suffered forced deportations, famine and decades in the camps, but such traumas weren’t ever discussed. For Kurkov – ethnically Russian and Russian-speaking but long based in Ukraine – truth-telling has been a mission ever since. Having registered on TikTok to follow the account of artillery officer Tetyana Chubar, I have started worrying about her too. I am willing her to emerge victorious from each new artillery duel and I would gladly support her quest to paint the self-propelled cannon pink all over – albeit after the war, of course. I think this will not only be her biggest reward but will be the icing on the cake for all her TikTok followers." Eight months on, despite almost worldwide condemnation of Vladimir Putin's actions, the fighting remains vicious and vast swathes of Ukraine are without water or electricity.

This erasure of history, memory and fact is, Kurkov says, key to the enduring power of the Kremlin, whoever may be lodged there, whether Czar, Stalin or Putin. Most Russians, he says, don’t want to know what the Kremlin did to Ukraine: they don’t even want to know what it did to Russia. Surprisingly perhaps to a British audience, he is not an unalloyed supporter of Zelensky, whose leadership has won worldwide praise, drawing comparisons to Winston Churchill. Although he does believe the president has proved himself under fire. As well as examining the invasion from a civilian perspective, as you might expect from a novelist, Kurkov's book is filled with vivid and impossibly poignant descriptions of life during conflict. Diary of an Invasion' is Andrey Kurkov's diary written during the ongoing war in Ukraine. It starts a few months before the war and describes the events leading up to the war and Kurkov's own everyday, personal experiences. It ends at a time a few months after the start of the war. The diary runs for around six months. Around the time the diary ends, the expectation was that the war will get over before winter or latest by spring. But now we know that the war has dragged on into the second year with no end in sight. Kurkov says in his epilogue that he is continuing to work on this diary and we can expect a sequel.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. 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.”