Sitting on a shabby bench in a bleak hospital hallway, a beautiful woman with a mop of dark curly hair looks like a creature from a different world – until a nurse asks her if she can buy a shovel that the hospital needs.
The woman smiles and promises to buy at least two shovels.
“I’m becoming something like a janitor here. They come to me with whatever they need,” she says. “Last time I bought 10 trash cans.”
Nataliya Yusupova, a socialite close to the family of former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, has abandoned the Kyiv party scene for now to take care of Ukrainian soldiers wounded in Russia’s war against the nation in the east.
Yusupova, previously known as Vetvytska, became popular after starring in “Rich People Cry Too,” a reality show on Ukrainian 1+1 TV station. She was a regular at celebrity events and parties. But that’s all in the past. She hasn’t been to a party in six months, she said.
“Parties are taboo now,” Yusupova says.
Some months ago, Yusupova saw a post on Facebook calling on people to buy medicine for the hundreds of wounded soldiers staying in a Kyiv hospital. And so she did.
“I took some pictures there and then posted them on my page and suddenly what seemed like all my 16,000 friends and followers started asking me to help bringing their money to the hospital or to arrange some delivery they could pay for,” she explains.
Since then, the celebrity diva has become a guardian angel for the struggling hospital. She’s been posting photos of wounded soldiers online and telling their touching stories to encourage people to donate money for their treatment.
Yusupova has been evidently spending a lot of her own money, too. She lives from renting out a range of expensive real estate in the city of Dnipropetrovsk and is famous for her love for Valentino dresses.
“I’ve just bought 10 iPads for them, boys need some fun here,” she says with a charming smile.
But it is actually a smile and kind chit-chat that can help even more than money does, the woman says.
“I always try to come here beautiful and in a good mood,” Yusupova says, with the firm conviction that a beautiful woman can raise a man’s spirit. That much is obvious as a young man comes out of a hospital room, with bright eyes at the sight of Yusupova. “Here you are,” he says as his eyes brighten and kisses her on the cheek.
The man is 24-year-old officer Oleh Berezovskyi. He lost both hands in fighting but manages to stay cheerful. He and Yusupova quickly made friends.
“She always brings tasty things and lifts my mood. Time here passes much more quickly when there is someone to talk to,” Berezovskyi says.
Yusupova has seen a lot of terrible wounds and heard a lot of horrifying stories here, but tries not to cry in the presence of soldiers. “They see enough grief. Some of them have seen hundreds of their comrades die in front of them. So I decided to bring only joy,” she says.
She cannot stay away from the hospital.
“Once I had coffee with one of the volunteers in town and then I suddenly felt guilty for being there and not with our boys,” she says. “So we went to the hospital at 7 p.m. and spent three hours there.”
Yusupova says she got to do a lot of things she would never imagine herself doing some six months ago.
When she is not feeding soldiers or helping the disabled, she works on getting the hospital much-needed infrastructure improvements. The poor condition of the walkways in the hospital courtyard prompted her to pay for new concrete walks.
“It was just impossible to roll wheelchairs on them,” she says. “But my dream is to put asphalt here on the whole hospital territory.”
Her volunteering is planned days in advance – cooking, visiting and arranging concerts. Yusupova says she has almost no free time now, but is happy to put herself to use and is surprised that everyone is not doing this for their nation.
“After those TV shows, people think that I do nothing but party,” she says. “There is a time for parties and buying expensive gifts for one’s beloved self. And there is a time for helping people. And that time is now.”
Kyiv Post staff writer Daryna Shevchenko can be reached at [email protected]
