7 min Click here to listen to this article

Share via Close extra sharing options Email Facebook X LinkedIn Threads Reddit WhatsApp Copy Link URL Copied! Print

Copy Link URL Copied!

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred

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.”

“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.........

© Los Angeles Times