Dating on the front line: Ukrainian women travel to keep love alive

Kharkiv: Everything happened so fast. On their first in-person date, they went to see a play, and she whispered in his ear, “I think I’ve fallen in love with you.” Soon after, they were married. And shortly after that, he was sent back to the front.

When Damina Serbyn and Roman Myronenko met at a theater in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, last year after a short online courtship, they dreamed of spending their lives together in domestic bliss. But with Myronenko fighting Russian forces on the front line, that has yet to happen.

Serbyn lives alone, and has to travel for hours every two weeks to see her husband, a deputy commander of a drone battalion based near the northeastern city of Kharkiv.

On a recent cold winter evening, she was on a train rolling into Kharkiv that was carrying other women coming to see their loved ones at the front — a dangerous journey to a city that has come under constant attack by missiles and drones. When the door opened, Serbyn jumped off the train and into her husband’s arms, kissing him.

When she is away, he does not feel like he is truly living, said Myronenko, 38. Serbyn, also 38, is a clerk with the government gas company. “Without her, nothing makes sense,” he said.

As the war drags on, and as Russian forces make steady advances into Ukraine, soldiers are fighting with little hope of being demobilized any time soon and returning home to their loved ones. Many women, determined to maintain their relationships and keep their families strong, make risky trips to areas near the front, often taking children along.

Some travel to places like Kharkiv, which are usually more dangerous than the cities and towns where they live. Others travel to front-line bases, where they are often in even more peril.

“I was scared,” said Kateryna Kapustina, 32, a journalist, who brought Yaroslav, her 9-year-old son, to spend their vacation in a frontline village where her husband, Ihor Kapustin, 34, is based. In civilian life, Kapustin was a mechanic; in the war, he often has to tow broken vehicles from perilous positions facing Russian forces, she said.

“My son and Ihor are all I have,” Kapustina said. Before she began making regular trips to the front, she said, “I felt like we were getting too used to living without one another.”

Yulia Hrabovska, 35, a voice actress from Kyiv, was four months pregnant when her husband, Volodymyr Hrabovsky, went to war. When she visits him near the front line, they usually stay indoors and try to have a homey life — lying in bed or watching a movie together. Sometimes she cooks his favorite banana pancakes. “We try to imagine that for these two days, there is no war,” she said.

They became friends when she was his teacher at a drama school, but never thought of starting a romantic relationship until Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Along with other friends, the two sheltered in the first days of the invasion at her parents’ home.

In mid-March, when Russian tanks were roaring past on the highway next to her village, Semenivka, in the Poltava region of eastern Ukraine, she took his hand. “I thought to myself, please God, let us all survive. If we will all survive, I will kiss him.”

Hrabovsky was thinking of kissing her, too, while holding her hand in her parents’ garden and listening to the Russian tanks.

They did survive and kiss, and have been dating ever since.

Hrabovska said the news that her husband was going to deploy to the front came just after she got pregnant.

“Those were very difficult days,” she said. “It was scary to imagine the baby growing up without a father.” But then she said she realized that other women were going through the same thing. “Other girls manage it somehow, so I will, too. There are a lot of us.”

Kharkiv, close to the battle lines and full of soldiers, has become a hot spot for front-line dates. The train station has two flower shops whose main clients are soldiers.

Not far from the flower shop is a hairdressing salon. Karina Semenova, 42, said that nearly all of her clients were soldiers, and that “they all miss love and care.” (She found a romantic partner from the front line, a soldier, when he came in to get a haircut.)

Some women come bearing food for their husbands and their comrades.

Before traveling recently to see her husband, a soldier based outside the contested town of Vovchansk, northeast of the city of Kharkiv, Yevheniya Dukhopelnykova, 47, spent an entire day cooking.

She made at least six different dishes for her trip, including mushroom pâté, baked pork, baked duck and a hot chile sauce that her husband’s entire unit now loves, she said. She also prepares dried meat and bakes croissants.

The next day, she made the eight-hour journey by car from the central Ukrainian village of Pavlysh to see her husband, Mykhailo Chernyk, 44, a junior sergeant. When she arrived, it was already dusk. Her husband walked toward her along the village street, where military vehicles are visible outside houses where soldiers are quartered.

She stopped the car and ran out to kiss and hug him. “I need him to keep me warm,” she said. They brought the food inside the house where he lives with other soldiers, and he opened the bag with croissants and took a bite of one, smiling.

Hanna Zaporozhchenko, 40, made the trip to the front to bring her husband, Sgt. Stanislav Zaporozhchenko, a surprise present for his 38th birthday. He ran to meet her train with a bouquet.

The family has two children, 11 and 5. They miss their father, but she said she would not risk taking them along.

Of their dates, she said, “He has a totally different life now, but when we speak, often he starts falling asleep, as he says he starts feeling relaxed.”

She feels like she must now give her exhausted husband support. “I came because I love him,” she said. “I am his wife and his mental health support.”

Women also say they are willing to make the risky journeys since they know they may never see their husbands again if they do not.

Alina Otzemko, a clinical psychologist, said she visited her husband, Vasyl Otzemko, nine times in 18 months. She always took her son along.

In June, Vasyl Otzemko was killed in action. But because of their trips, the couple’s 4-year-old son at least remembers his father, she said.

“Now I understand that I did everything right,” she said. “It’s good that I didn’t listen to anyone who tried to talk me out of it. It was the only way to keep my son’s memory about his daddy,” she said.

Before her husband was killed, Alina Otzemko published a book for children and their parents to help explain “why daddy is not at home.”

She has now written a new one that she said helped her come to grips with her loss: “Why Daddy Died.”