22-year-old model Bogdana came to Milan for a few days to work at Fashion Week. The war has turned her life upside down: stranded in the Lombard capital like so many other Ukrainian models, she is now sorting aid packages for her home country.
“I felt kind of silly, unreal, being on the runway while people were dying, I felt embarrassed and the audience didn’t really care,” she tells AFP. When the bomb sirens sound in her Ukrainian city in the middle of the night, Bogdana Didenko Nevodnik is woken up by an app on her smartphone. She experiences the war from afar, minute by minute, from her exile in Milan.
Her first reflex was to “take the first train or bus back” to Kamianske, near Dnipro. However, she was discouraged by her husband, a young surgeon, and her family. Tall and slim, with long black hair tied at the nape of the neck and an intense gaze, she, along with about 20 other volunteers, is busy distributing the many aid packages waiting in the small yard of the Ukrainian consulate in Milan for onward transport be made available to war zones. Colorful drawings of children demanding “No to war” adorn the facade of the building, at the end of which bouquets of flowers have been laid. Cars and trucks load and unload packages of groceries, medicines, batteries and toys in a constant coming and going.
“killing machines”
“If I have to, I will join the army. There are many women there, I’m ready to risk my life for Ukraine,” assured the young model, dressed all in black, who models for big brands around the world. As a teenager, she took boxing lessons. “I’ve always had a fighting spirit,” she said, adding that she’s also a “good shot” since “we practiced on targets in our free time.”
“The Russian military that has invaded my country are terrorizing our people and want to destroy us. They show the whole world that they are just animals, soulless robots, killing machines,” she says. “They are bombing maternity wards with pregnant women in them, why should that be a strategic goal?” Bogdana says indignantly.
Another Ukrainian model among the volunteers, 20-year-old Valya Fedotova, admitted she was close to tears during her show at Milan Fashion Week, the first-ever of her young career. “But you can’t cry on the catwalk, they pay me to do it and I can send the money to my family in Ukraine.”
“In Shock”
The night the Russian army began bombing her hometown of Malyn, about 100 kilometers from Kyiv, she couldn’t sleep, she “is still in shock,” said the slender girl with the gentle face shares an apartment with six other Ukrainian models who are all stuck in Milan. Even before the bombing, she had begged her family to flee, but only her mother and two sisters fled to relatives near the Polish border, her father preferred to stay with the cat.
Your dream? “For this stupid war to end, I just want to lead a normal life, come home and see my family.” Ivan Sokolovskyy, 28, asked his employer in Milan’s fashion industry for leave to help out right at the start of the Russian invasion, packages onto trucks and act as interpreters. “I couldn’t stay at home alone and watch the news, I wanted to help my people,” explains the former model from Ternopil in western Ukraine.
His greatest fear is the Chernobyl power plant, the site of the worst nuclear accident in history in 1986, which has been occupied by the Russians since February 24: “I’m afraid that they’re going to wreak havoc in Chernobyl, that really scares me. They are so crazy that they are able to.” (AFP)
This article was previously on FashionUnited.fr