Wedding bells amid exploding shells
Love prevails amid the war in Ukraine
KYIV, Ukraine (AFP) — She should have awoken to the sound of popping champagne corks on her wedding day, but Tetyana was instead startled out of bed by Russian rocket fire near her home in central Ukraine.
“At first I thought it was thunder. But the sky was clear, and I realized that it was shelling,” the 31-year-old designer told AFP, recalling how she raced to the corridor outside her room in case of a direct hit.
Shocked at the destruction wreaked by the pre-dawn explosions but determined to go ahead with their nuptials, Tetyana and her fiance Taras exchanged their vows on schedule, six hours later.
“Initially I thought we should cancel the wedding, but my fiance told me we should go ahead .... The war doesn’t have any right to ruin our plans,” Tetyana, who asked for the couple to be allowed to use assumed names, said.
“And we have the right to create our family and live our lives to the fullest.”
The couple, who married in June in the industrial hub of Kremenchuk, 250 kilometers southeast of Kyiv, are part of a massive surge in weddings brought on by the war with Russia.
“In May we realized that the war might last quite a long time. We decided not to postpone life until later because, as this war has shown us, later might never happen,” Tetyana told AFP.
Tetyana and her fiance Taras exchanged their vows on schedule.
In the Poltava region where Tetyana and Taras tied the knot, there were 1,600 weddings in the first six weeks after Moscow’s 24 February invasion — compared with 1,300 for the whole of 2020.