Bogdana, 22, had come to Milan for a few days, the time to parade at Fashion Week. The war has turned her life upside down: stuck in the Lombard capital like so many other Ukrainian models, she is now sorting out aid packages for her native country.
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“I thought it was kind of silly, unreal, to be on the podium when people were dying, I was ashamed and felt like the spectators didn’t really care,” she says. at AFP.
When the bombing sirens sound in the middle of the night in her city in Ukraine, Bogdana Didenko Nevodnik is awakened by an application on her smartphone. She saw the war from a distance, minute by minute, from her Milanese exile.
His first instinct was to “return by the first train or bus” to Kamianske, near Dnipro. But she was dissuaded by her husband, a young surgeon, and his family.
Slender, with long black hair tied at the back of her neck and her gaze intense, she is busy, like about twenty other volunteers, distributing the many aid parcels dumped in the small courtyard of the Ukrainian consulate in Milan, with a view to their return to war zones.
Colorful drawings of children demanding “No to war!” adorn the facade of the building, at the bottom of which bouquets of flowers have been placed. In an incessant coming and going, cars and trucks load and unload packages of food, medicine, batteries and even toys.
“Killing Machines”
“If necessary, I will join the army, there are many women, I am ready to risk my life for Ukraine”, assures the young model, all dressed in black, who marches for major brands in the whole world.
As a teenager, she took boxing lessons. “I’ve always had a fighting spirit,” she says, adding that she was also “a good shooter” because “we practiced on targets in our free time.”
“The Russian military who invaded my country are terrorizing our people, they want to destroy us. They show the whole world that they are only animals, soulless robots, killing machines,” she accuses.
“They bomb maternities with pregnant women inside, how would that be a strategic target! Bogdana says indignantly.
Among the volunteers, another Ukrainian model, Valya Fedotova, 20, says she was on the verge of tears during her show at Milan Fashion Week, the very first of her young career. “But you can’t cry on the podium, they pay me for it and I can send the money to my family in Ukraine.”
” Shocked ”
The night the Russians started bombing her hometown of Malyn, about 100 km from Kyiv, “I couldn’t sleep, I’m still in shock”, says this slender young girl with a sweet face. , who shares an apartment with six other Ukrainian models, all stuck in Milan.
Even before the bombings, she had begged her family to flee, but only her mother and her two sisters took refuge with relatives near the border with Poland, her father preferred to stay there, with the cat.
His dream ? “Let this stupid war end, I just want to live a normal life, go home and see my family.”
At the start of the Russian invasion, Ivan Sokolovskyy, 28, asked his employer in the fashion industry in Milan for leave to lend a hand, load packages on trucks and act as an interpreter. .
“I couldn’t sit at home alone watching the news, I wanted to help my people,” says the former model from Ternopil in western Ukraine.
His big fear is the Chernobyl power plant, site of the worst nuclear accident in history in 1986 and occupied since February 24 by the Russians: “I think they are going to do something again in Chernobyl, that really makes me fear. They are so crazy that they are able to do it. »