'Message of defiance': The Ukrainians getting married as war wages
Tetiana was expecting it to be the sound of champagne bottles popping that got her up for her wedding in the morning, but she was instead dragged out of bed by a Russian missile falling near her home in central Ukraine.
"At first, I thought it was thunder, but the sky was clear," the 31-year-old designer explained. "I realised it was a bombing."
Shaken by the destruction but determined to go ahead with their nuptials, Tetiana and her fiancé Taras got married as planned, six hours later.
"At first, I thought we'd have to cancel the wedding, but my fiancé told me that we had to go ahead," said Tetiana, who asked that both their real names not be used. "The war has no right to ruin our plans."
"We have the right to start our family and live our lives to the fullest," she added.
The couple, who got married in June in the industrial city of Kremenchuk, 250 kilometres to the south-east of Kyiv, are one in a huge wave of people who have got married in Ukraine since Russia began its invasion at the end of February.
Neighbours since the age of six, Taras proposed to Tetiana last year and they initially hoped for a spring wedding.
"In May, we realised that the war could go on for a long time and decided not to postpone our lives until later because, as this war has shown us, this 'later' might never arrive," Tetiana said.
In the region of Poltava, where Kremenechuk is situated, around 1,600 weddings took place during the first six weeks following the start of the invasion, compared to 1,300 in the entirety of 2020.
In the capital, the increase is even more significant, with 9,120 marriages recorded in five months; that's eight times more than the 1,110 weddings that occurred during the same period in 2021.
A recent sunny Saturday in Kyiv
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