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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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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article portrays Russia’s war on Ukraine as having created a vast population of gravely wounded soldiers and civilians, and it presents the Superhumans Center in Lviv as emblematic of Ukraine’s effort to transform that trauma into recovery through advanced prosthetics, reconstructive surgery and psychological care for war survivors.[1][3][6]
It depicts Superhumans co-founder and CEO Olga Rudneva as a driven civic leader who, together with business partner Andrey Stavnitser and major donors such as Howard Buffett, quickly built a cutting-edge clinic to confront unprecedented levels of limb loss and facial injuries, situating the project within a broader story of Ukrainian ingenuity and global philanthropic support.[2][5][6]
The column repeatedly emphasizes the clinic’s mission to redefine wounded Ukrainians as “superhumans” rather than victims, highlighting triple amputees who stress-test prosthetic devices, a drone pilot who returned to the front lines after losing both limbs, and young veteran Ruslana Danilkina, whose public persona—fashion shoots, social media presence and a winning performance on “Dancing with the Stars”—embodies a new, confident image of disability.
Through Rudneva’s reflections on childhood memories of impoverished, silent World War II amputees, the piece argues that contemporary Ukrainians are determined to ensure a different future in which people live “with scars, not wounds,” and children grow up seeing war survivors as outspoken heroes and winners rather than broken casualties.
Moreover, the article stresses Superhumans’ holistic model of care—combining prosthetics, reconstructive surgery, hearing and vision restoration, psychological rehabilitation and social reintegration—suggesting that this integrated approach, offered free of charge, can help rebuild lives even as the nature of battlefield injuries shifts from land mines to drones and frostbite.[1][3][4]
At the same time, the column frames Superhumans not only as a medical institution but also as a cultural project: by concentrating the “most gravely” and “most motivated” patients in a world-class hub, the center is portrayed as helping Ukraine craft a new national identity rooted in resilience, technological innovation and shared sacrifice, a narrative echoed in other coverage that casts the facility as a symbol of Ukrainian defiance amid war.[1][2][5]
Different views on the topic
In contrast to the column’s largely celebratory tone, reporting by US-based outlets and international partners often stresses the immense scale of war-related injuries and describes Superhumans as serving severely wounded patients while acknowledging that, with roughly a thousand or more treated so far, the center reaches only a fraction of the many thousands of amputees and trauma survivors across Ukraine; this perspective presents Superhumans as a powerful symbol and model of care, but not as a comprehensive solution.[1][3][6]
Moreover, policy-oriented commentary emphasizes that Superhumans was created because Ukraine’s health-care system “does not have the capacity or the technology” for advanced prosthetics and reconstructive surgery, framing the center as an emergency response to systemic shortfalls and underscoring the need for long-term public investment and broader infrastructure rather than relying primarily on one flagship clinic and philanthropic initiatives.[2][5]
Some analyses highlight that the Superhumans Center operates as a charity reliant on international donations and separate from regular state hospital funding, raising concerns about how free, high-quality rehabilitation for amputees and trauma patients will be sustained over decades once global attention and private philanthropy diminish, and suggesting that lasting support for disabled veterans must ultimately be anchored in stable government and social welfare systems.[1][5]
Additionally, interviews from Superhumans and other rehabilitation settings underscore the deep psychological scars carried by those labeled “superhumans,” including intense fears about telling family members they have lost a limb and challenges in adapting to civilian life, which complicate any straightforward narrative of war turning Ukrainians into triumphant superheroes and instead reveal a mix of resilience, vulnerability and ongoing mental health needs.[4][7]
Finally, some reporting on Ukraine’s wounded frames them primarily as “war heroes” whose rehabilitation is closely tied to future military effectiveness and national security, stressing that centers like Superhumans help “war heroes walk again” and “walk back to victory”; this perspective diverges from the column’s focus on broader societal inclusion and disability normalization by foregrounding the strategic value of restoring combatants, and it raises implicit questions about whether individual well-being might be subordinated to the demands of a prolonged conflict.[3][6]
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