Cluster bombs instead of confetti as besieged fighter marries bride by text message from steelworks
Ukrainian soldier trapped in ‘fight to the death’ over Mariupol ties knot online between Russian attacks
Even in quieter times, Bogdan Semenets wasn’t the kind of man many women would see as ideal husband material. A soldier with Ukraine’s Azov Battalion, he has spent most of the past few years on the front lines of eastern Ukraine, fighting pro-russian separatists.
Today, he is among 2,000 fighters holed up in Mariupol’s Azovstal steelworks, making a last stand against Vladimir’s Putin’s forces. Yet despite being a dubious prospect for marriage, and a likely candidate for funeral rites, last month he texted his girlfriend in Kyiv, asking her to marry him. Her reply gave him what may prove to be one of the last happy moments of his life. “Yes,” she said.
“When he proposed to me, I couldn’t refuse,” Nataliia Zarytska, 36, said. “We’ve been going out for three years, and I was hoping we’d get married anyway, but not for another year or two. The war, though, is speeding up our lives, and our time together now is shrinking.”
The couple stand little chance of living happily ever after. Indeed, in accepting her partner’s proposal, Ms Zarytska may be doing little more than granting a condemned man’s wishes.
While the Russian president has said that the Azov fighters can surrender, Mr Semenets would rather save his last bullet for himself than trust in the mercy of the Kremlin. As he said in a recent text to his beloved: “Better our commanders order us to kill ourselves than we give ourselves up.”
Ms Zarytska spoke as Ukrainian officials said that most remaining civilians sheltering in the plant had been evacuated by the United Nations.
The Kremlin has refused a similar amnesty for the Azov fighters, who are low on food, ammunition, water and medicine. Hundreds are injured, their untreated wounds going gangrenous.
It was in these grim conditions that Mr Semenets exchanged his wedding vows online with Ms Zarytska on April 17. The ceremony was conducted by his commanding officer, who can perform marriages under military law.
But with limited Wi-fi in the steel plant, there was not even a Zoom ceremony. Instead, the couple sent each other signed wedding consent forms via the Telegram messaging channel – his form handwritten, and bearing his commander’s stamp.
“A female Azov fighter who was a
trained lawyer acted as a witness,” said Ms Zarytska. “The day before, she had lost her own husband in the fighting, but she drew up the documents for our wedding anyway.
“We had no ceremony, no dresses or suits, and afterwards the Russians attacked again. We had cluster bombs for our wedding instead of fireworks.”
Ms Zarytska, who works in agribusiness, met Mr Semenets through a mutual friend while he was fighting with Azov against Russian separatists in the Donbas region.
Once they had started dating, the couple would see each other when Mr Semenets was on leave, pursuing a mutual interest in literature. A favourite was We the Living, a novel by the Russian-american author Ayn Rand that critiques life under Soviet rule.
After the war began, Mr Semenets was incommunicado throughout March and early April. When Ms Zarytska received a flurry of delayed Telegram messages on April 9, her hair “went grey”.
“He’d lost 20 kilos and looked gaunt, plus two of his comrades that I knew had died. At that point he began saying that he could die any day. He’d aged as well – he looks 45 now, and inside he says he feels 100 years old.”
Last week, Ms Zarytska joined other wives of Azov fighters at a demonstration in Kyiv, pleading for their own government and others to do more to save their husbands’ lives. Greater international pressure, they believe, could persuade the Kremlin to allow the fighters safe passage out of the Azovstal plant.
In a video conference from the factory yesterday, Azov commanders said they had been “abandoned” by Nato, which had refused to supply them with weapons. They claimed that, in total, 25,000 people had died in Mariupol in the fighting.
Ms Zarytska said that since the West had supported Ukraine in the war, it had a duty of care to the Azov fighters.
“It is all very well for the UN to focus on civilians, but soldiers like my husband have risked their lives to defend Mariupol,” she said. “They deserve some protection too.”
Few believe they will get it. Mr Putin has already told his forces to starve the remaining fighters out, ordering the Azovstal plant to be sealed so that “not a fly can get past”.
And in his latest Telegram messages to Ms Zarytska this weekend, Mr Semenets said they could also be his last.
“It can’t go on like this much longer,” he wrote. “We may not meet again. XXX.”