Buried Occupation Diary Becomes Ukrainian Author’s Last Work; In “I Transform,” Volodymyr Vakulenko Records Life during Russian Aggression

By Yumiko Kurashige / Yomiuri Shimbun Correspondent

7:00 JST, February 25, 2025

KYIV — Monday marked three years since Russia started its aggression against Ukraine. With Russia occupying more and more Ukrainian territory and forcefully “Russianizing” the country, many natives are fighting back by attaching themselves more strongly to their identity as Ukrainians. Beyond the front lines, they are fighting another, quieter battle to protect Ukrainian culture by means such as preserving the Ukrainian language and publishing records of the aggression.

“I finally found it!” said Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian novelist. It was Sept. 24, 2022, and she was standing in the garden of a house in the village of Kapitolivka in Kharkiv province, eastern Ukraine. Victoria, then 36, had been frantically digging under a cherry tree in the village, which the Ukrainian army had just liberated from Russian occupation. At last she had uncovered a plastic bag, inside of which was a bundle of paper rolled up like a tube.

The paper comprised 36 pages of closely-spaced handwritten Ukrainian. It was a diary.

The pages had been buried in the garden by children’s author Volodymyr Vakulenko, then 49, a day before he was taken away by Russian forces. Only his 76-year-old father knew about them.

“On March 7, a column of enemy soldiers carrying tricolor flags moved in from the Donetsk region. The difficult occupation days have begun.

“I never thought that my home village would become a center of Rashist occupation.” [“Rashist” is a word that combines “Russian” and “fascist.”]

The diary recorded the tense situation in the village and the condition of his autistic 17-year-old son Vitaliy over the course of about three weeks starting in early March 2022. The entry for March 21 read: “I saw cranes in the sky, and it seemed to me the birds were saying, ‘This will all be Ukraine again! We believe we will be victorious!’ followed by a blank space. The diary ended there.

Amelina was working on collecting evidence of war crimes committed by Russian forces when she got in touch with Vakulenko’s father and learned about the diary. She promised him she would “make every effort” to bring it to the broader world. She quickly took pictures of the pages with her smartphone and sent them to a literary museum in Kharkiv, hoping to ensure that even if she was killed by a landmine afterward the diary would remain.

In August 2023, 11 months after she found the diary, a book titled “I am Transforming … Diary of the Occupation. Selected Poems” by Volodymyr Vakulenko, hit bookstores in Ukraine. The book drew attention as a record of war crimes and as the final work of Vakulenko, who was found to have been shot by Russian forces. The book has already been translated into English and other languages.

The book carries a foreword by Amelina, followed by a note that reads: “Victoria Amelina was injured in a missile attack by Russia in Kramatorsk on June 27, 2023, and died on July 1.”

Amelina, who was caught up in an attack by Russian forces a month before the publication of the book, never saw its release. July 1 was also Vakulenko’s birthday.

Connecting two wills

Amelina brought the diary that she had unearthed to Olena Rybka, 40, an editor at major Kharkiv-based publisher Vivat. Rybka was also a friend of Vakulenko’s.

From the start, they faced a major dilemma. While there was certainly value in bringing the diary to the world as a record of occupation and war crimes, they wondered: Did they have the right to publish a diary that the author had buried in the ground?

The answer was in the diary.

“Today is the 10th day of the occupation. When the battle ends, the FSB (the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation) will come, and this diary will be in their hands. Even so, I expect the manuscript to be handed over to an international organization, in accordance with the rules of the international community.”

The traces of revisions left in the diary, such as words whose order had been changed, indicated that Vakulenko had not written the diary only for himself. Amelina and Rybka agreed that he had wanted the diary to be presented to the world, regardless of whatever his fate might be. So they began working to publish the book.

Part of the book’s title, “I am Transforming,” was taken from the title of a pre-war poem he had left behind. They hoped that, through their work, the experiences and thoughts recorded by Vakulenko would transform, take on special meaning and be preserved.

At a book fair held in Kyiv on June 22, 2023, Amelina, with a brand-new sample of the book in her hand, stressed the importance of bringing it to a lot of people.

She invited Vakulenko’s mother Olena and son Vitaliy to visit from Kharkiv and showed them around the capital city by car the following day, hoping that they would make good memories there.

It was four days later that she was caught up in the missile attack in Kramatorsk, eastern Ukraine.

“Please don’t take her away,” Rybka prayed in front of Vakulenko’s grave. But her prayer was not granted.

Despite being plunged into deep grief, Rybka had no time to stop working. “Amelina strongly hoped she would be able to make Vakulenko’s voice heard. The most important thing was to keep working with the mission in mind more than ever,” she said.

The diary also includes the following lines: “People can get used to anything. What is important is what kind of person you will go on being.”

Rybka believes that Vakulenko wanted to say that people should continue to believe in themselves and their values however hard their circumstances might be.