Kyiv, Ukraine (AP) – When the couple awoke to the roar of war on February 24, they had been dating for just over a year. Russia was invading, and Igor Zakwacki knew he had no more time to lose.
He took out the engagement ring he had bought, but until then he was not ready to give it to Katerina Litvinenko, and proposed marriage. If death separates us, he thought, let him be like husband and wife.
“I didn’t want to waste a minute without Katya knowing I wanted to spend my life with her,” Zakwacki, 24, said as he and his 25-year-old bride exchanged vows and wedding rings this month in the capital, Kyiv.
The newlyweds have joined a growing army of Ukrainian couples who are rapidly turning love into marriage because of the war. Some are soldiers who get married just before they go to fight. Others are simply united in the determination that living and loving fully are more important than ever in the face of so much death and destruction.
Ukraine’s military laws include a provision that allows Ukrainians, both soldiers and civilians, to apply and marry on the same day. In Kyiv alone, more than 4,000 couples have taken advantage of the accelerated opportunity. Before the war, a month’s wait was the norm.
After a three-month interruption of normal service, the central civil registry office in Kyiv is fully open again and operating at almost pre-war rates. Since Russia withdrew its heavily bloodied invasion forces from around Kyiv in April, redirecting them to the east and south fronts, many people fleeing the fighting have returned. The number of weddings increased accordingly.
Among those who returned was 22-year-old Daria Ponomarenko, who fled to Poland. Her boyfriend, 23-year-old Evhen Nalivayko, had to stay because of rules that did not allow men between the ages of 18 and 60 to leave the country.
Reunited, they quickly got married – because “we don’t know what will happen tomorrow,” she said.
Jealously guarding their intimacy after the painful months apart, they were just the two of them, without friends and family. Instead of a puffy wedding dress, she wore a Ukrainian embroidered shirt, the traditional embroidered shirt now chosen by many brides to emphasize their Ukrainian identity.
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In peacetime, they would choose a traditional wedding with many guests. But that seemed frivolous in the war.
“Everything is perceived more sharply, people become real during such events,” he said.
Anna Karpenko, 30, refused to allow the invasion to cut off her wedding – she arrived in a white limousine.
“Life must go on,” she said. She and her new husband dated for seven years, often talking about marriage, before the war put the plan into action.
Pavlo and Oksana Savriha had already been married for 18 years before the invasion forced them to renew their vows – this time in a small 12th-century church in the war-torn northern city of Chernigov.
“Our souls told us to do it. “Before the invasion, we were constantly running somewhere, hurrying, and the war forced us to stop and not postpone important decisions for tomorrow,” Pavlo said.
As Oksana took refuge in the basement of their home, her husband took up arms, joining the Territorial Defense Forces as Russian forces surrounded and bombed Chernigov in the initial unsuccessful phase of the invasion.
He later joined the regular army. They celebrated their love in church this month.
The next day he was sent to the front.
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