Ukrainian Nurse And Doctor Wed, Pose For Photos Among Ruins In War Torn Kharkiv

Amid Ukraine-Russia war, a Ukrainian couple exchanged wedding vows and posed for photographs surrounded by rubble in Kharkiv.

Shortly after they got married on Sunday, Anton Sokolov and Nastya Gracheva were pictured amongst the rubble of a shopping and office complex in Ukraine's second biggest city, reported Daily Mail. They posed on top of a car that was smashed during the invasion.

According to Vanity Fair, as soon as the war started, the newlyweds made themselves available to Ukraine. While the bride used to work as a nurse in an oncology clinic, the groom is a doctor. The two started giving free medical care to people, and when they ran out of medicines, they started raising funds and getting more.

The news of their wedding came as Oleh Synyehubov, the regional governor in Kharkiv, said that in the last few hours, Russian tanks and artillery launched more than 20 strikes on the city and its outskirts in Ukraine's northeast. Synyehubov said that in a town southeast of the city, Russian soldiers fired on a convoy of buses that was trying to evacuate patients from a hospital. The hospital building had been heavily damaged in shelling. About 70 patients needed to be taken away from the damaged hospital in Balakliya, he added.

Russian forces are yet to withdraw from Kharkiv as has happened around the capital, Kyiv. Still, people like Sokolov and Gracheva are taking time out to create some happy memories. They are the latest couple to get married despite the invasion. There were many who were due to tie the knot before the invasion. They have been sharing how they have refused to let the war change their wedding plans since the attack started in February.

Apart from planned weddings, many proposals have also taken place. One Ukrainian soldier even staged a military search so that he could surprise his girlfriend, who was being driven through a checkpoint in the city of Fastiv, near Kyiv.

Last month, Oleksandra Matviichuk, Ukraine's head of the Center for Civil Liberties, tweeted a photograph of a woman, Yaroslava Fedorash, kissing her new husband in uniform.

The post read that they had applied for the wedding on April 29, but on Feb. 24, "Putin went completely insane." In the post it was mentioned that the groom joined the territorial defence, and the bride became a volunteer. It didn't make sense for them "to wait any longer" to get married.