Wartime Vows
Danylo Kovalenko, 22, and Diana Haidukova, 19, met through a dating app in late 2022. He reminded her of an anime character she liked. She shared his love of music and his quirky sense of humor. As missiles rained down on their home city of Zaporizhzhia, they reached for each other.
“I’d never seen her love someone this much,” Liza Yakymova, 20, Diana’s best friend, told the Washington Post. “He knew what she liked and didn’t like. He cooked her food when she came home from work. Whatever her imperfections, he loved every part of her.”
The two were creative, ambitious, and not much older than we are. But the world they lived in was no romantic wonderland. Their favorite spots were getting destroyed by Russian missiles. Air raid sirens, a terrifying signal of danger, became background noise that wailed throughout the streets several times a day.
Amidst the chaos, Diana soon moved in with Danylo. They lived with his parents in a four-room apartment in a historic building. One night, as they crowded into a basement bomb shelter, he got down on one knee. Their four month anniversary hadn’t happened yet, but with the violence occurring around them, neither wanted to waste a second.
“I quickly and frivolously married this funny clown,” Diana later posted on Instagram, along with a video of her kissing Danylo while singing, “I got married at 19 years old, despite the war!”
One month before their first wedding anniversary, Russian missiles tore through their apartment building. Instead of an anniversary, they got a cremation.
At first glance, Diana and Danylo’s love story sounds like something out of Frozen: they literally engraved their wedding rings with the word “croutons” as a reminder of when they said it in unison while shopping for groceries.
But it’s no coincidence that Ukrainian media is full of stories like theirs. In the first five months of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, over 9,120 marriages were registered in Kyiv, compared to the 1,110 registered over the same period just a year before.
Some couples get married, then immediately join the army. Sometimes they’re lucky, and their spots are given up to more experienced fighters. Other times, they die together in the trenches.
The demand for weddings has been so great that several organizations have begun volunteering their time and resources to plan weddings for Ukrainian defenders. One such organization is Zemliachky, a mostly Kyiv-based NGO whose name translates roughly to “woman compatriot.” The organization was founded by former travel guide and television presenter Kseniia Drahaniuk and her husband Andriy Kolesnyk when Kolesnyk’s sister enlisted in the Ukrainian army on February 24, 2022: the day Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As of right now, Zemliachky is the main supplier of women’s military gear and uniforms—the army doesn’t have gear designed to fit women’s bodies.
"We collected the kits at our own expense and sent them to where it was most needed,” Darahniuk told Ukrainian media outlet Svidomi. “Over time, other volunteer hubs started helping us. Then we found that the army was not prepared for the physiological needs of women. And this is what really bothers me — I want women to feel comfortable.”
As more and more women enlisted to protect their country, Darahniuk launched the “Weddings for Defenders” project, which partnered with local organizations to provide free weddings to Ukrainian soldiers.
Not all military couples have time for a proper wedding. One example is Khrystyna Lyuta and Volodymyr Mykhalchuk, who met while fighting for the Ukrainian army in Donbas, in Eastern Ukraine.
They got married two months later, in front of a closed wedding registry office in Druzhkivka, just 25 miles from the front line. Instead of a wedding dress, she wore her camouflage pants, army boots, and a blouse with vyshyvanka, traditional Ukrainian embroidery. He wore his soldiers’ uniform. The ceremony was brief, and they shared it with another couple from their brigade. Within a few hours, they went back to fighting.
“I can't give them free days as such,” the brigade’s commander, Oleksandr Okhrimenko, told AFP. “The only thing is that they won't be on the frontline, they will stay in the rear."
While Putin wants Ukrainian people to give up, they keep living. Even when their loved ones are being sent off to fight, imprisoned, hurt, or killed, they keep loving. Even when children are being kidnapped and maternity hospitals are being bombed, they keep starting families. In Ukraine right now, love is a symbol of resistance and resilience: the real-life equivalent of a Disney film.
(Can’t get enough of stories of love amidst war in Ukraine? Check out this list of stories about Ukrainian couples. Also, consider donating to Zemliachky or to Marriage for Hero, an organization devoted to planning weddings for Ukrainian defenders.)
BY VERONIKA MOROZ