The Bizarre Domesticity of Wartime Survival

In Ukraine, cute meetings don’t happen in a dimly lit wine bar.

Take Natalia, a 28-year-old from Lviv. At eighteen, she watched her dad head off to the war and decided the military was her calling, making her way into a communications unit despite initially being turned away for her age. She met her husband on base, and nothing quite sets the foundation for lifelong romance like an immediate nine-month deployment to the Donetsk region right out of the gate.

The 12-Hour Evacuation

Fast forward to February 2022. Natalia is heavily pregnant and visiting her mum in the Kyiv region. When her husband rings on the day before the invasion suggesting she pack her bags, she employs the classic civilian tactic of flatly ignoring military intelligence. The next morning, planes roar overhead at 3 a.m., and her father casually declares the war has started, entirely preempting the president’s national broadcast.

What follows is a thoroughly miserable 12-hour evacuation, packed onto a train crawling through the active combat zones of Bucha and Irpin in pitch darkness, waiting for a stray missile. Her father, meanwhile, having explicitly promised not to volunteer until officially called up, promptly marches off to join the fight.

A Bomb Shelter Birth and a Three-Hour Wedding

The absurd pacing of the Ukrainian military really outdid itself that spring. On April 9th, Natalia’s husband was sent to the Kharkiv region; precisely two days later, on April 11th, she gave birth. She spent her postpartum period dragging a newborn into bomb shelters to the sound of air raid sirens, which really takes the shine off the miracle of life.

When the family finally managed a brief reunion in the liberated Kyiv region, the army granted him three days of leave. Naturally, they decided to cram in a baptism and a church wedding. In a stroke of darkly comic timing, right as they were waiting to exchange vows, his commander rang to give him three hours’ notice for a deployment to the absolute meat grinder of Avdiivka. She stood at the altar internally calculating the logistics of kidnapping her own groom before giving up and saying “I do”.

The New Normal

Both men survived the ensuing years, collecting multiple concussions across Sumy, Zaporizhzhia, Robotyne, and Kursk. Predictably, neither has any interest in discussing the reality of the front with her, preferring to swap horror stories exclusively with each other.

Now, Natalia navigates the bizarre domesticity of wartime survival with a four-year-old daughter who points at every man in a military uniform asking if it’s dad, and casually observes Iranian-designed Shahed drones cruising overhead as if they were local pigeons. The kid doesn’t even flinch at sirens anymore – one of those grim little developmental milestones we’ve all just decided to accept as perfectly normal.

If you fancy watching a masterclass in navigating the absolute absurdity of modern warfare with your sanity mostly intact, you can watch Natalia tell her own story in the full video interview at the top of this page. Frankly, if she can endure a twelve-hour evacuation train, a three-hour wedding leave, and her husband raising a toddler via dodgy video calls from a trench, the least you can do is give it twenty minutes of your time. Grab a strong tea, ideally somewhere without a looming Shahed drone, and hit play.