Featured Excerpt: Looking at Women Looking at War

Her call sign as a war crimes researcher at Truth Hounds is Casanova. She seems about my age, and I’m thirty- seven. She, too, has a son, long hair, and an ambition to write a book. Yet while I quit my day job and did write my novels, Casanova has committed herself to defending human rights and then, since 2014, to researching war crimes. Over the years, many quit the field, switching to less stressful ways of pursuing justice, but not Casanova.

She asked me not to use her real name in the book for safety reasons. Casanova joined missions in the war-torn Donetsk region in 2014 and the occupied Crimea peninsula in 2018. Who knows where she steers next to pursue the ideals of justice and human rights? If she ever gets caught by one of the war criminals she is helping to find and convict, it’s certainly better if they don’t know she is a key researcher at Truth Hounds.

Casanova is my reason for writing this book: I wanted to write about her. At first, it disappointed me when she asked if she could remain anonymous. I wondered if her mannish call sign, Casanova, would work well for portraying her, a pretty young woman driving minivans, to which she gives cute nicknames, into the war zone. Her old white Mercedes Vito is Birdy, and she is Casanova. However, she told me a story that made me see her call sign differently.

It was the end of 2021, the seventh year of the Russian war against Ukraine, when Casanova decided to quit her job as a war crimes researcher. Dozens of missions to the front line and temporarily occupied territories hadn’t led to a single court hearing at the Hague. She resolved not to think about the lack of final results—criminals on the court bench. She kept doing her job well, documenting new war crimes, writing reports, taking pictures of the shell holes, and recording videos of the atrocities in the east of Ukraine. She didn’t lose her faith in justice or human rights, no. She felt it was time for a change. Still, the choice wasn’t easy; the Truth Hounds team had become her family, and pursuing justice in the Russian-Ukrainian war had kept Casanova going for the past seven years. Yet she planned a brave new life for herself by the beginning of 2022: Casanova and her husband would buy a house and plot of land in Central Ukraine, grow a beautiful garden around it, and live there in the house with the beautiful garden happily ever after.

Casanova already knows what kind of trees she’d have there: apple, apricot, and cherry trees. Those grow best on Ukrainian soil, and the climate is most appropriate. She would even enroll in a master’s program at the Kharkiv National Agrarian University to be as good a farmer as she is a war crimes researcher. Her small family would make a living by selling the fruit and inviting people from busy cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv to live their village dream as green tourists—a simple, happy life.

She tells me the story, and the name Casanova suddenly has a different meaning: casa means “house” and nova is “new” in Portuguese.

The garden around the future house, around the casa nova, was all well planned, or at least well dreamed. In March 2022, Casanova was going to travel to the Poltava region of Ukraine and find a house with a plot to buy near Myrhorod, in the heart of Ukraine, a canonical Ukrainian town mythologized by Mykola Hohol.

So Casanova quits her job in war crimes research, celebrates New Year in Kharkiv, and drives Birdy to the war zone in the east of Ukraine on the first day of 2022. Her friends volunteer each winter season to bring Christmas presents and entertain kids in schools along the front line. The Kharkiv-based team calls themselves St. Nicholas’s Deer, and Casanova is usually their driver. Although playing with kids isn’t easy for her, she, like the rest of the team, dons funny deer’s horns and watches the fun from the side, so she witnesses not only tragedy in the war zone but joy too. She started 2022 by driving the team to Stanytsia Luhanska, the town where Russian forces shelled one of the schools in 2014 and began the escalation in 2022, which would hit Fairy Tale kindergarten soon, on February 17.

Because of the shelling, several teens from the nearby village in the Luhansk region, Vrubivka, asked St. Nicholas’s Deer to evacuate them; their parents didn’t want to leave but granted their permission for the kids to go. The team booked accommodation in the Carpathian Mountains. Casanova brings them to Kharkiv but won’t drive them farther west; she feels that she cannot go far from Kharkiv now. Unlike me, she has a real plan if Russian forces invade. Throughout February 2022, while I packed my swimming suits and summer dresses for a vacation in Egypt, Casanova bought extra gasoline and studied evacuation routes from Kharkiv to Svitlovodsk. In Svitlovodsk, her Kharkiv friends and their Polish partners set up a shelter in case the full-scale invasion began. They stocked plastic canisters with fuel, a lot of it. Casanova had sixty liters waiting on the balcony in her Kharkiv apartment so that she would be ready to start immediately.

The Truth Hounds prepared themselves for the war too. Casanova’s ex-boss, the executive director of Truth Hounds, Roman Avramenko, was in the Luhansk region to train the prosecutors there in war crimes research when he received a call from Brussels: leave the Luhansk region immediately. He did, without much hurry. But such warnings came from everywhere, and all eventually appeared to be wrong. So it was only on the evening of February 23, 2022, that Roman finally wrote on the Truth Hounds work chat the two words meaning almost the highest level of danger: “Code orange.” At that moment, everyone on the team knew what to do, how and where to move. Casanova left the chat at the end of 2021, so she didn’t receive that message. She was at her home in Kharkiv.

Despite the dream of settling near Myrhorod, Casanova is all about the road. She loves to drive minivans that can carry a team of war crimes researchers or volunteers. The work in human rights defense isn’t exactly a gold mine, so the minivans she drives are pretty old. Each of them gets a name—or maybe a call sign. If they stall, she talks them into keeping going and not letting the team get stuck in danger. Their names are no secret: the green Volkswagen is Cucumber, the yellow one’s Fishy; these are corporate vehicles shared by the Truth Hounds team. Casanova’s own minivan is a white Mercedes Vito, and she has named it Birdy. When the attack on Kharkiv started on February 24, 2022, Casanova executed her tasks according to the evacuation plan, carrying passengers with her Birdy.

She’d evacuate as many as possible and get back to researching war crimes. Everyone in war crimes research in the region is all too familiar with Russian tactics; they see the flood of horrible war crimes coming their way.

Her plan for a new home with a garden will have to wait. Near Poltava, where she was going to buy a new house, Casanova stops at a gas station and messages Roman Avramenko at Truth Hounds, the organization she left at the end of 2021 to start a new life.

“Any vacancies?” she inquires with bitter irony.

“Well, of course. What would you like to do?” Roman replies. On February 27, she posts on her Facebook page: “Dear all, I am alive and well, my family is safe. Obviously, I’m back to volunteering and ‘work.’ Well, you got it. Please send me information about the shelling of civilians in the Kharkiv region (in personal messages only).”

Casanova doesn’t speak Portuguese. And the dream about the house and the garden appeared, of course, long after Casanova got her call sign. Still, it seems to me that it’s this idyllic Ukrainian vision of a house surrounded by cherry trees, casa nova, that she is protecting by remaining incognito. And even when Casanova begins to speak again to the eyewitnesses and war crimes survivors, I will keep seeing her “new home” as if shining through the reality of destruction, injustice, and human pain.