Volodymyr VAKULENKO

No one was brought to justice for the killing of Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vakulenko during the year. However, in May 2024, the human rights initiative Truth Hounds published a detailed investigation into his murder, alleging broader involvement from the Russian Federation’s Federal Security Service (FSB). 

News that he had been abducted first emerged in April 2022, but information about his fate was only made possible after the Ukrainian army recaptured Izium from Russian forces in September 2022.  According to Vakulenko’s family, members of the Russian forces raided his home on 22 March 2022, seizing phones, documents, and books in Ukrainian. A day later, they took Vakulenko and his son Vitalii, diagnosed with autism. They undressed the writer to inspect his tattoos and beat him. Both were allowed to return home the following day. Vakulenko subsequently decided to bury his war diary under a cherry tree in his garden. Around 11 am on 24 March, a bus with a Z-sign drove up to Vakulenko’s house and took him towards Izium. His relatives never saw him again.  

On 28 November 2022, DNA analysis carried out by Ukrainian forensic and war crimes investigators confirmed that a body found in grave N.319 in the woods of Izium, eastern Ukraine, was that of Vakulenko. In November 2023, the Ukrainian authorities announced they had identified two soldiers of the Russian army involved in the murder of Vakulenko, and that an arrest warrant would be issued against them.  

Award-winning writer Volodymyr Vakulenko – pen name Volodymyr Vakulenko-K – was born on 1 July 1972. He had published 13 books by the time of his death, including Monoliteracy (2008), You Are… Not (2011), The Sun’s Family (2011), and We, the Province! (2013). Vakulenko defined his own genre, with elements of postmodernism, modernism, neo-classicism, and logical absurdism, as ‘counterliterature’.