Sitting in a wine bar in Kyiv on a Saturday night, Daria, 34, opens a dating app, scrolls, then puts her phone away. After spending more than a decade in committed relationships she's been single for a long time. I haven't had a proper date since before the war, she says.
Four years of war have forced Ukrainians to rethink nearly every aspect of daily life. Increasingly that includes decisions about relationships and parenthood – and these choices are, in turn, shaping the future of a country in which both marriage and birth rates are falling.
Millions of Ukrainian women who left at the start of the 2022 full-scale invasion have now built lives and relationships abroad. Hundreds of thousands of men are absent too, either deployed in the army or living outside the country.
For those women who stayed, the prospect of meeting somebody to start a family feels increasingly remote.
Khrystyna, 28, says it's noticeable that there are fewer men around. She lives in the western city of Lviv and has been trying to meet a partner through dating apps without much luck.
Closer to the front line, many men on active duty are also shelving the idea of starting a relationship. Uncertainty, they say, makes long-term commitments feel irresponsible.
Ruslan, a soldier serving in the Kharkiv region, knows the promises he can make are limited. Beyond visits once or twice a year, he asks, what can I actually offer a girl right now?
In many ways, they already have. Since the start of the invasion, the number of marriages has decreased sharply from 223,000 in 2022 to 150,000 in 2024. Ukraine has also seen deaths increase, enormous emigration – more than six million people have left the country since 2022 – and a stark decline in birth rates.
These all lead to a dramatic drop in population, which in turn shrinks the workforce and slows economic growth. Oleksandr Hladun, a demographer, describes these trends as the social catastrophe of war.
Despite the government's efforts to tackle these issues with strategies for affordable childcare and housing, the effects of the war will last well beyond the end of hostilities.
As uncertainty looms large, many individuals like Daria have come to terms with solitude not by choice but as a reflection of the harsh reality of their surroundings. Learning to live with that is, in itself, a form of survival, she concludes.
