Abcarian: In Ukraine, the war with Russia has created a nation of 'superhumans'

Olga Rudneva, lanky and elegant in a dark pantsuit, sat in the comfort of a plush alcove at Casa del Mar, the luxury Santa Monica hotel, incongruously showing me photographs of wounded and maimed Ukrainians.

Some are soldiers, some civilians. A man's face is crisscrossed with black lines from gunpowder. Another is missing his nose. A little boy is missing an arm. A woman who was a cook near the front lines has a grotesquely scarred face.

"This guy," Rudneva said, pointing to another, "has burns so he doesn't have ears anymore."

Swipe.

"This guy we were trying to put his eye back."

She showed me many amputees with sleek prosthetics. Most are missing a single limb, but many are missing two, three and occasionally all four.

"This girl lost both of her limbs," Rudneva said. "She was a drone pilot. She is back to the front lines."

Rudneva, 49, is the co-founder and CEO of Superhumans Center, a cutting edge medical clinic in Lviv, Ukraine, near the Polish border. Superhumans treats people maimed in the war launched nearly five years ago by Russian President Vladimir Putin. The center, which opened in spring 2023, specializes in reconstructive surgery, prosthetics and psychological support. So far, it has treated more than 5,000 war survivors, and employs about 650 people.

One member of the team, Rudneva said, is a 26-year-old triple amputee responsible for testing - and breaking - prosthetics.

"He normally has two weeks to crush any prosthetic and he loves it," Rudneva said. "He has one arm and the only thing that really bothers him is he is running out of space for his tattoos."

She tipped her phone toward me. It was someone's hand, but the fingertips were gone.

"We are the first country at war in the last 50 years in cold conditions," Rudneva said. "When it's cold, everyone is talking about snow skiing, and I am thinking about frostbite cases."

Rudneva, who is married to a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, was in California earlier this month to attend the Stanford Sustainability Summit. In 2024, Stanford named her a "global changemaker" and invited her back this year. Gail Abarbanel, founder of the Santa Monica-UCLA Rape Treatment Center, is helping Rudneva connect with donors and introduced us.

A year or so after Putin launched his full-scale invasion, Rudneva said, it became clear that Ukrainians were going to be dealing with extraordinary levels of physical and emotional trauma for a long, long time.

She had been organizing relief efforts out of Poland with her business partner Andrey Stavnitser, a wealthy entrepreneur who co-owns a port in the Odessa region. Stavnitser was worried about what would come next for Ukraine. "Andre said, 'Olga, we need to start thinking about tomorrow. Let's build a hospital.'"

Rudneva, who had been working for Ukraine's largest private HIV/AIDS foundation, approached American philanthropist Howard Buffett, a son of Warren Buffett, who was already funding projects in Ukraine, for a million dollars in seed money. To her shock, Howard Buffett gave $16 million. Richard Branson, Sting and Trudie Styler are among the center's other high-profile donors.

At first, Rudneva said, Superhumans Center treated wounds to the lower part of the body because manywere stepping on mines. But now, because the war has moved from the ground to the sky, upper-body and head wounds predominate. Drones have changed everything.

"The front lines looks like a 'Mad Max' movie," Rudneva said. "The cars are in huge [anti-drone] cages, and you are driving like 100 miles under a drone net."

In April 2023, the first Superhumans Center opened in Lviv, hundreds of miles west of the front lines in eastern and southern Ukraine.

Among the center's early patients was Ruslana Danilkina, a recent high school graduate who was waiting on tables and studying to become a tattoo artist before she joined the army in a burst of patriotic fervor. Danilkina figured she'd be doing paperwork in a relatively safe environment.

She spent a couple of months in Zaporizhizhia, which continues to be bombarded daily by Russian missiles and Iranian-designed Shahed drones. Then, wanting to be closer to the front lines, she worked as a radio operator, tracking troop movements, coordinating evacuations and reporting fatalities.

"You lose your sense of time and reality," Danilkina told me from Ukraine on Monday, with help from an interpreter. "Night shifts and constant shelling take away your sense of what is real."

On Feb. 10, 2023, just kilometers from the front line in Kherson, her vehicle came under heavy Russian artillery fire. Fragments from an exploding cluster bomb pierced the car. "The first thing I remember," she said, "was the smell. Burned flesh. Blood."

At 19, Danilkina became one of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers to lose a limb, her left leg.

"I wanted to hide my injury," she said. "I didn't even want my friends to know what had happened to me. You feel guilty, almost ashamed, because suddenly you're different."

Many operations and several prosthetics later, Danilkina now has a thriving social media presence and has become a symbol of Ukrainian resilience. Magazine covers. Fashion shoots.

She swims and rollerblades, and competed on a special edition of Ukraine's "Dancing with the Stars" in December, winning the contest with an emotional rumba that received a perfect score from the judges.

"When I first walked into Superhumans, I met people with two and even three prosthetic limbs," said Danilkina, now 23. "I immediately felt something there. It felt like home. That was when I realized this is where I want to begin my new life."

Rudneva was raised with her grandmother's dire stories about the grim aftermath of World War II: the poverty, the hunger, the broken amputees. At the end of this war, Rudneva said, Ukrainians are determined things will be different.

"We will be the same people, not with wounds but with scars," Rudneva said. "The same people, not silent but speaking. If our kids are raised surrounded by superhumans, it's going to be a different trajectory for us."

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

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