It is a manuscript of about thirty pages written on the spot, which Volodymyr Vakulenko took care to bury in the garden of his parents’ house, under a cherry tree, before his arrest. Viktoria Amelina – also a writer – unearthed this diary after the chaotic withdrawal of Russian forces last September. “I was the first Ukrainian to come to his house after the liberation and his father showed me where he had hidden him. He had dug well to find him but without success, he was desperate. I started digging my turn, what else to do ?” She eventually found the precious document. “Volodymyr had wrapped it in a simple supermarket plastic bag, there was black soil on it and when I opened the package, the paper was a bit wet. So I was worried about its preservation, it’s why I gave it to the Literary Museum in Kharkiv.”
Account of life under Russian occupation
Volodymyr Vakulenko, who knew he was threatened by the arrival of Russian soldiers, decided to stay with his adolescent and autistic son Vitaly. The war is raging and he puts it down in his diary: “Fighting like an angry viper climbs closer to my hometown. Enemy planes have bombed the residential areas, at the end of the street there is only a huge crater and at the bottom a torn pipe from which a stream of water flows, like blood escaping from a cut artery”.
These writings of Volodymyr Vakulenko is part of a long list of Ukrainian works of the resistance movement against Russian imperialism, believes Tetiana Pylypchouk, the director of the Kharkiv Literary Museum who cleaned and digitized the diary to make it available to visitors. “The museum has already saved many documents which testify to the crimes committed by Russia in Ukraine in the past and in particular at the beginning of the 20th century. This diary completes the collection. It is a tragic sequel, Volodymyr’s writings relate the life under Russian occupation, this new attempt to eliminate Ukraine and the Ukrainian literature it represented.”
When the Russian army finally enters his village of Kapytolivka, Volodymyr Vakulenko is more discreet. “The first days of the occupation, I got a little old, probably also because of hunger… Now I’ve pulled myself together. I’m even developing my vegetable garden a little bit and I’ve done my potato reserves in my house”, he writes.
Volodymyr Vakulenko “was denounced”
But his activism does not appeal to everyone in the village. On March 24, he was arrested by Russian forces and will never be seen alive again. “Volodymyr knew he would be betrayed by someone because it’s a village where everyone knows each other. These neighbors knew that he only spoke Ukrainian, that he was a staunch supporter of Ukrainian independence, and since there were collaborators among the locals, he was denounced. Someone told the occupiers that he was a Ukrainian activist and gave his address. It’s like that”, explains Viktoria Amelina.
It will take the return of the Ukrainian army to the region to learn that Volodymyr Vakulenko has been executed. His body was discovered in a mass grave in Izioum. His war diary will be published in the coming weeks. Here are his last words: “The little birds only sing in the morning. In the afternoon, even the nasty crows are silent. For the rest, it’s the music in my laptop that keeps me going. Today, poetry festival, I was greeted by cranes flying high in the sky and I thought I heard them singing: ‘everything will be fine in Ukraine. I believe in victory’”.
Ukraine: the “war diary” of a writer found after his execution – Report by Omar Ouahmane
