LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Ukraine has been profoundly changed by more than three years of Russia's full-scale war. With so many wounded in the country, the Ukrainian edition of Playboy is asking how beauty has changed. Its latest issue featured a photo project with five wounded female soldiers and civilians wearing Ukrainian-designed clothes. NPR's Polina Lytvynova spoke to one of them.
OLHA DIATLIUK: (Speaking Ukrainian).
POLINA LYTVYNOVA, BYLINE: Thirty-five-year-old Olha Diatliuk is from the city of Vinnytsia in central Ukraine. She says her life is divided into two parts - before and after July 14, 2022. That's when a Russian missile hit a clinic in Vinnytsia. She was inside with her mother-in-law. The explosion broke her ribs. She partially lost her hearing and suffered severe burns to her arm. She screamed when medics tried to treat her burns.
DIATLIUK: (Speaking Ukrainian).
LYTVYNOVA: "It was so painful that the whole clinic could hear me," she says. Every dressing was like they were just ripping my skin off. Her husband, Yurii, looked after her.
DIATLIUK: (Speaking Ukrainian).
LYTVYNOVA: "I asked him if he would love me with the wounded arm," she says, "and he laughed and said, of course I will." Yurii was in the military. A year after the missile strike, he was killed on the front line.
DIATLIUK: (Speaking Ukrainian).
LYTVYNOVA: "So first the Russians mutilated my body," she says, "and then they ripped out my heart." Olha fell into a depression, wore only black and did not bother doing her hair or makeup. But she also remembered how Yurii loved her, even with her scars. To accept her body, she took part in photo shoots. That's how she ended up in the latest issue of the Ukrainian edition of Playboy as part of the project Beauty with Scar. In one image, she's wearing a black dress and looks intensely at her disfigured arm in the mirror.
DIATLIUK: (Speaking Ukrainian).
LYTVYNOVA: "Scars are not shameful," she says, "they show our strength."
Polina Lytvynova, NPR News, Kyiv. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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