Victoria Amelina explored a land of atrocities and secrets

The summer grass was long under the cherry tree, and they did not know where to dig at first. Victoria Amelina was standing in a garden in the village of Kapytolivka, near Izyum in eastern Ukraine, with the aged father of Volodymyr Vakulenko, a poet. The poet had been shot by the Russians, his body hastily buried in one of 400 graves. His father, desperate with grief, could cling only to one thing: that Volodymyr had told him he had buried his diary of the Russian occupation under the cherry tree.