Surgeons restore girl’s face severely burnt with sulfuric acid

Last year Russian media reported about the 28-year-old resident of the city of Tver Lyudmila Tkachenko whose appearance was badly deformed after somebody threw sulfuric acid at her face. The police still do not know who committed the crime. Lyudmila suspected her former partner Vladimir. He tried his best to reason her into coming back after they split up. He threatened her and begged for mercy but to no avail. Lyudmila had been seeing a new guy.

Photo: Surgeons restore girl’s face severely burnt with sulfuric acid

Lyudmila Tkachenko was on her way from a grocery store on March 15 last year. She saw a stranger standing near her apartment building. “I felt no pain at the beginning. I thought it was some kind of a joke and it was water that he threw at my face. But then I took a deep breath and my throat filled with fire,” said Lyudmila in her last year’s interview. The perpetrator used highly concentrated sulfuric acid.

Back then the girl did not even dream of restoring her looks. Saving her eyesight was her only concern. Maxim, her fiance, recalls his astonishment when he saw Lyudmila’s face without bandages. “Her left eye looked like a deviled egg, there was just a slit in place of her right eye,” said Maxim.

“I saw nothing through the bandages yet I could feel that Maxim was really close all the time. He was talking to me while holding my hand. He proposed to me shortly after I underwent surgery. ‘I want you to be my wife. I will not leave you,’ Maxim said to me on that day,” recalls Lyudmila.

Many people took part in the saving of Lyudmila. The best surgeons offered their services after Komsomolskaya Pravda spread her story far and wide. The surgeons at the Moscow Gelmgolts Clinic performed an operation on her eyes. She also had two plastic surgeries on her face performed by specialists from Moscow and Tver.

The eyesight in Lyudmila’s right eye has been fully restored. The eyesight in her has been restored almost completely. The swellings on her face have not yet gone down but her facial features look the same. Lyudmila will have to go through several operations in April.

“I want to give birth to a child after it is all over. Maxim wants to have a baby girl so much!”

“So when are going to get married?”

“We were planning to get married in August last year but we had to cancel our plans due to surgery. I really could not have walked down the aisle with a face like that! So far we have been living together. We are going to get married later this summer.”

“Did you hear anything from your ex?”

“He started writing letters to me again. He maintains he has nothing to do with the incident. He is asking me ‘to stop bringing disgrace on him’.”

According to Dmitry Fedichkin, district attorney of city of Tver, Lyudmila’s case was put on hold due to “lack of identification of a person who is subject to criminal prosecution.”

Komsomolskaya Pravda