Ukrainians who got married on the day of the Russian invasion celebrate one year anniversary together with the war

Yaryna Arieva and Sviatoslav Fursin will not celebrate their first wedding anniversary this Friday (24).

The Ukrainian couple got married on the day Russia launched the full-scale attack against their country. A year later, Ukraine is still at war. Russian missiles are still falling from the sky and people are still dying.

Not much to celebrate, they say. “A year has passed and all the memories are starting to come back,” Arieva told CNN at her and Fursin’s home in Kiev.

She said that for months she avoided wearing a suit she was given just days before the Russian invasion because it brought back memories of the darkest moments of her life. “It’s not the memories you want to have in your head all the time,” she said.

Arieva, 22, and Fursin, 25, rushed to get married at St Michael’s Golden Domed Monastery on Feb. 24, months ahead of their planned May wedding. They wanted to be together, regardless of what came next.

Since then, the site has become a favorite spot for foreign dignitaries to visit on their trips to show support for Kiev. Most recently, US President Joe Biden was pictured there with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky during his surprise visit on Monday.

“I remember my wedding ceremony and that feeling of not knowing anything. That unpredictable, really scary future,” Arieva said.

On the same day, they took up their weapons and volunteered in their local unit of the Territorial Defense Force, the volunteer branch of Ukraine’s armed forces, determined to defend their city. Arieva serves as an elected Kiev city councilwoman, a part-time unpaid government post that has ensured she is given a gun.

Fursin was immediately sent to the front lines. he said to CNN who saw a bus full of volunteers and just jumped on it, not knowing where he was going.

He and other volunteers were forming the second line of defense north of Kiev, in Irpin, Hostomel and other areas that quickly became important battlegrounds.

“On the first night, we weren’t quite ready. We had no trenches, nothing,” she said.

Fursin was put in charge of a group of 10 people, mostly very young men. His qualification lay in being the only one of the 11 who had ever held an automatic weapon before.

“The commander watched me handle the gun and said, ‘Take these people and make cover and ambush positions and think which way you’re going to run,’” Fursin reported. “We were digging trenches. Just digging, digging, digging, all night.”

Arieva, meanwhile, was back at the base of her territorial defense unit in Kiev, trying to be helpful.

“The first night I waited for my husband, when he left for his first battle, I think that was the scariest night of my life because of course I couldn’t call him because he had to hang up the phone,” she said.

“I wasn’t religious, but at that moment I prayed to every god I know that he would come back safe and sound.”

The next month and a half is a blur for both of them.

Fursin continued on missions. He was mainly manning checkpoints and forming a second line of defense, but he found himself face to face with Russian troops a few times and was trained to fire anti-tank missiles. He refuses to go into detail beyond saying that he used his weapons during that time.

“We were told not to talk about it,” he said.

Arieva, meanwhile, worked in a small office with eight other people from 7 am to 10 pm each day. There were three small tables with just enough space for computers, let alone people. Protein bars and Snickers, cigarettes and tobacco became hard currency at that time.

Both admit the experience was difficult.

“In our dreams, when we imagined, we were so heroic and strong. And the reality was that we took a bath once a week because there were no showers inside and it wasn’t very pleasant, [com] lack of sleep and sometimes food,” she said.

Still, they look back with pride and fondness.

“Everyone forgot who they were, whether they were very famous or very rich or very influential politicians, they were just helping each other, smoking together and not knowing what was going on,” said Arieva.

Arieva said she quit smoking a few days before the start of the war, but her resolve did not last.

“I said I’d quit on Victory Day, but I might have to try sooner,” she said.

civic life

When Russian troops withdrew from the Kiev region in early April, Arieva and Fursin’s time in territorial defense came to an end. The military decided they needed to professionalize the volunteer units and only those with previous military experience were allowed to remain.

Fursin and Arieva were asked to leave the defense.

“It was difficult to go back to being civil because we didn’t want to be protected, we wanted to do something,” she said.

They tried to enjoy the little things, like the first cappuccino since the beginning of the war.

“It was the most delicious thing. That cappuccino with the foam, that beauty, that flavor, it [a guerra] it really made us value things a lot more,” she said.

For Fursin, last year’s invasion was the second of his life. He grew up in Crimea and lived on the Ukrainian peninsula when Russia forcibly annexed it in 2014. His grandmother was too sick to travel at the time, so they stayed.

“I remember how the place changed after that. We used to joke that you sleep in one country and wake up in another,” he said.

When Fursin’s family finally left Crimea, they settled in Irpin. Just three years later, his home was once again invaded by Russian troops.

The couple describe the shock of returning to Irpin after she was released in early April. The city north of Kiev became the front line during the battle for the capital. It was here that Ukrainian forces managed to repel the attack.

The family home was still standing, but it was severely damaged, with windows smashed and half the building burned.

Back in the civilian world, the couple began volunteering, bringing food and basic supplies to liberated settlements north of Kiev. Demand was so great that they sometimes had to make several trips a day.

“I remember Katyuzhanka, because we brought a lot of bread and pasta and some pasta sauce and batteries, and there were a lot of people waiting. We gave it all we had and we had to go back and bring more bread because more than half of the people didn’t get anything and didn’t have a slice of bread in that city,” said Arieva.

She still remembers people sharing terrible stories about life under the occupation and breaking down in tears listening to strangers speak Ukrainian.

“It was very… difficult to even hear these stories, it hurts,” she said.

Slowly, life began to return to normal. It was spring and Kiev was in full bloom. It really felt like a renovation, they said.

They had their official wedding at City Hall and a small celebration in May, mainly because the deposit was paid and non-refundable. Arieva finally introduced her husband to her 97-year-old great-grandmother.

Both had lost their jobs early in the invasion. Arieva worked for the Voters Committee of Ukraine, an observer organization, and Fursin for a housing cooperative in Irpin.

As they started to run out of money, they decided to focus on work and studies.

Over the summer, Fursin finally graduated from university. He started his degree in Crimea, but when his family fled the occupied peninsula in 2019, he had to start over. He is now working intermittently on software development projects.

Arieva, for her part, decided to focus on learning to code. Technology is the only sector that is still growing in Ukraine because it allows people to work remotely.

But his plan to work and study remotely was derailed when Russia launched a wave of attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure in the fall. Working was quickly becoming impossible.

“We had two hours of electricity, then five hours of no electricity, then three hours of electricity, it was really demoralizing,” Arieva said.

“The worst thing was that the streets were not lit. And not all people wear their torches or have jackets [refletivas] to be seen on the road. And every week I would see a car accident from my balcony and a few people would die,” she added.

In the fall, they adopted a cat and named it Kus, the Ukrainian word for “bite”. Even now, months later, Fursin’s arms are covered in cat scratches.

As Christmas approached, the couple, along with their families, decided to change the date on which they would celebrate the Christmas holiday.

Instead of January 7th, which marks the birth of Jesus according to the Julian calendar, still used by the Russian Orthodox Church, they celebrated it on December 24th, which marks the birth of Jesus according to the Gregorian calendar.

“So we had two Christmases in 2022,” Arieva said.

The Orthodox Church of Ukraine announced in the autumn that it would allow its churches to celebrate Christmas in December.

“Makes more sense. It was more symbolic and I really liked it. And it’s also good that we are no longer celebrating with the Russians,” said Arieva.

The family did not have the usual 12-course Christmas dinner spread because the electricity was on for only six hours that day. They cooked Kutia, the traditional porridge-like Ukrainian Christmas meal consisting of wheat or rice, raisins, nuts, honey and poppy seeds, using the emergency gas cylinder.

As the first anniversary of the war – and their wedding – approaches, Arieva and Fursin are reflecting on how the year has changed them.

Arieva said that she is a completely different person. “I became less naive and less childish. And maybe that made me a little stronger. Because what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, of course,” she said.

“Only when you see this do you understand the value of life. And for me, that’s 100%,” Fursin said. “From what we went through together, I understand that [estamos] Completely different. And that we continue to love each other, that, for me, is perhaps the biggest sign that it is true love,” he said.