‘Ukraine is our home’: A military family on love, war and independence

hromadske spoke with Andrii and Viktoriia about building a family during wartime, the lives they have chosen in Ukraine, and what independence means to them.

A third of his life at war

Evening settles over Kyiv’s Rusanivska Embankment, with cool air coming off the Dnipro River and the smell of lemon pastries drifting from a cafe across the street.

Andrii, 32, is originally from Vinnytsia in central Ukraine. He has been fighting since 2014, serving as a marine, sniper, reconnaissance soldier and unit commander.

His military callsign, Pidlyi - roughly “mean” or “nasty” in Ukrainian - actually predates the war.

Before joining the military, Andrii worked construction jobs with a group of friends and eventually began finding work for others. He enforced strict rules, including punctuality. When one worker showed up late for the fourth time, Andrii docked his pay for the day.

“He said, ‘Oh, you’re mean,’ and the nickname stuck,” Andrii recalls with a laugh.

He decided to keep it when he joined the military.

“Everyone is a Viking, a Spartan or a Titan. I haven’t met another Pidlyi,” he says.

In 2021, six months before Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Andrii left military service when his contract ended, as an old injury was causing health problems.

Someone asked him what it would take for him to return.

“When the big war comes,” he replied.

Three weeks before the invasion

Andrii and Viktoriia met online just three weeks before Russia launched its full-scale invasion. He was 27; she was a 19-year-old university student in Kyiv, working in a shoe store to pay for her studies.

By then, their lives had already been shaped in different ways by the upheavals Ukraine had lived through. Andrii had spent years at war. Viktoriia had been active in student initiatives, volunteering for displaced people and sending letters and drawings to Ukrainian soldiers.

“I was good at drawing, and my cards probably ended up with soldiers more or less like Andrii,” she says with a smile.

Andrii admits that after growing into adulthood during years of military service, he had little idea how to start a relationship. So he joined a dating site.

Viktoriia first noticed a photograph of him in a white Marine Corps dress uniform and blue beret.

“It looked almost intimidatingly good,” she recalls. “He was standing there so straight, like a future presidential candidate.”

“An admiral!” Andrii interjects.

She also noticed that he was older, with a mustache and beard.

“I thought, ‘Who are you? How old are you? Why are you even writing to me?’” she says. But they began talking, and one detail immediately mattered to her: he wrote in Ukrainian.

“That was a very important sign for me,” Viktoriia says. “I myself have made a point of not speaking Russian since 2020.”

A first date - with a knife in her bag

Soon after they began talking, Andrii sent Viktoriia flowers to congratulate her on completing her first university exams. The note said simply: “You’ll do great.”

She still keeps it, along with all the other notes he has written her.

“I even have a piece of wallpaper where he wrote ‘I love you’ with a very crooked heart and an arrow,” she says. “He left it for me before going away, and when I woke up and saw it, I burst into tears.”

Viktoriia was considerably less sentimental about their first dates.

When they met at a restaurant for the first time, Andrii arrived in a three-piece suit, having come directly from a television appearance. Viktoriia was wearing jeans.

“I looked at him and thought, ‘Oh no,’” she recalls.

They talked for four hours, until the restaurant closed.

On another date, Viktoriia agreed to go to Andrii’s apartment, where he promised to make syrnyky, Ukrainian cottage cheese pancakes. She brought a knife in her bag and left her parents a note with the address: “If I don’t come back, look for me here.”

The knife proved unnecessary. Andrii made syrnyky and tea.

For Valentine’s Day, he took her on a trip to the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.

“It was fun - and a bit of a test,” Andrii says when asked about his choice of destination.

Viktoriia passed. Their relationship survived the test, too.

Marriage in wartime

Three weeks after Andrii and Viktoriia met, Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Andrii returned to the military on the first day.

Even from the front, he tried to look after Viktoriia and her family as they evacuated, helping them find places to stay and checking whether they were safe and warm. Within months, the two knew they were a couple.

Viktoriia was too shy to tell him in person that she loved him, so she slipped a letter into his pocket instead.

Before the war, Andrii had thought a couple should live together for three or four years before considering marriage. War changed his sense of time.

“I realized I was ready,” he says. “And there was another consideration: if something happened to me, it would be better if our relationship was official.”

Viktoriia dislikes that reasoning.

“I tell him he’s an idiot,” she says. “What good would any of that do me if something happened to him? He thinks ahead. I believe he’ll come back soon, everything will work out, and we’ll live together with our child.”

Andrii proposed in the mountains, and the couple married in Kherson in the fall of 2023.

Marriage has changed him, he says.

“I’m quite a tough person, but my wife says I’ve become softer,” Andrii says. At times, however, the war leaves him with little energy for anything beyond his duties.

“She sometimes needed more care, more attention. And I couldn’t understand how she didn’t see that there was a war going on and I didn’t always have the time - or, most importantly, the strength. It becomes harder and harder to give that piece of yourself when your inner resources are running low.”

They have learned to talk through disagreements, even at a distance.

“If we argue, he calls me back,” Viktoriia says. “He doesn’t want anything left unresolved.”

Distance is a constant part of their marriage. Viktoriia has repeatedly traveled across Ukraine to be near Andrii, sometimes staying for months, sometimes seeing him for only a few hours. She has lived without heating or running water in damaged houses near where he was deployed.

“I understood that whether we stayed connected depended on me, too,” she says. “I miss him so much that sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind. When we are apart for too long, I stop feeling that I have the family I wanted so badly.”

Andrii says relatively few soldiers in the battalion he commanded were regularly visited by their wives or partners. But he believes those visits matter far beyond morale.

“When they get even a few days alone with someone they love, they come back completely different,” he says. “They fight much better afterward. So I had an interest in giving them that time to rest.”

He smiles.

“A wife is sacred.”

Their ‘little Independence’

Andrii and Viktoriia had talked about having a child and had begun preparing for it. Still, when Viktoriia became pregnant, the reality was daunting.

“It changes your entire life,” she says. “It’s frightening in its own way, and it’s an enormous responsibility. But am I happy? Yes, I am.”

The couple are expecting a daughter - the first girl in Andrii’s family in generations.

When they announced the pregnancy on social media, they reflected on the decision to bring a child into a life shaped by revolution and war.

“There will never be a perfect time. The perfect life will not begin tomorrow,” they wrote. “It is worth living today, loving today and bringing new life into the world.”

They ended the post with a message to their unborn daughter: “We are waiting for you, our little Independence.”

The family she will join already includes several four-legged members.

Andrii has four cats, all rescued from the front. Three now live with his parents in the Vinnytsia region. The fourth, a Maine Coon, stays with Andrii, who takes the cat with him when he moves between duty stations.

He says he needs someone to care for.

Viktoriia, meanwhile, would rather have a dog. She is willing to live with Andrii’s cats for his sake; he is willing to add a dog to the family for hers.

What does Ukraine mean to you?

At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Viktoriia had opportunities to leave Ukraine. She chose to stay.

Today, she works on projects restoring access to education in frontline communities. Visiting recently liberated villages helped shape that decision.

“I saw villages where houses had been destroyed, where there were bomb craters instead of schools, where there were no bridges and no access to water,” she says. “But people were still there, and among them were teenagers.”

She decided that was where her work mattered most.

“For me, education is about worldview, traditions and culture. It’s about how you see yourself and what you believe you can achieve,” Viktoriia says. “I want young Ukrainians to feel that they are needed here, that their country cares about them.”

For her, Ukraine is ultimately its people.

“It’s not just territory, cities, beautiful buildings or restaurants. It’s people,” she says. “I want to invest my life directly in people, wherever I can make a difference.”

Andrii’s answer is different, though not incompatible.

“I have a more pragmatic definition. I see Ukraine as my home,” he says. “Everything we think of as our own home, the place where we live - that’s how I see Ukraine.”

He says he first felt that connection acutely while fighting near Volnovakha in eastern Ukraine in 2014.

“It hurt as though someone had attacked my home,” Andrii says. “I feel physically and mentally inseparable from this country.”

Now a commander in one of Ukraine’s army corps, he says both his present and his future are tied to that home.

“I am Ukraine, and Ukraine is me.”

And for Andrii, defending it also means defending the land itself.

“Not because of fertile soil or particular towns,” he says. “I’m simply not willing to give what is mine to someone else.”