Diary from Ukraine: We were a completely normal family

T he war in Ukraine has a deep impact on people's lives. It has caused a massive crisis in families, and this crisis is exacerbated by forced separation: millions of women have gone abroad with their children, while men have remained in the country due to martial law and mobilization. In Ukraine, this phenomenon is called “distance divorce”.

The war not only created new problems, but it also acted as a catalyst: hidden cracks in marriages were exposed and their breakup accelerated.

“We were a completely normal family,” says Alyona, mother of two underage children from Kharkiv. "We didn't have any particular problems. It was like everyone else's: minor disagreements that we were able to resolve well overall."

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When the war began, Alyona left Ukraine with the children. Her husband stayed behind because he was of military age. Both initially assumed that the separation would only be short-lived. “We thought the war would last a few months and we would return home.”

But a few months turned into more than a year. Alyona repeatedly visited her husband in Kharkiv and noticed how their relationship was changing. “Every time I felt like we were getting further and further away from each other,” she says. In the end the marriage fell apart. The couple divorced. Only later, Alyona says, did she find out that her husband had started an affair with a colleague.

Today Alyona lives in Norway. She says she met a new man six months after the divorce. The two are now thinking about starting a family. She works in a fish processing factory and her children attend a local school. “I want to stay in Norway,” says Alyona.

Alexander from Dnipro says his wife went to Poland shortly after the war began. At first they stayed in close contact, but later she met another man and filed for divorce. “Especially back then, I wanted to join the military and needed their support,” he says.

Marjana from Odessa also started a new life abroad. She has lived in Germany for three years, married a Berliner and had a child. “I just like life better here,” she says. The divorce from her former husband had no specific reason. She decided to live in Germany and does not regret this decision.

The effects of war on families are contradictory. The statistics on marriages and divorces in Ukraine have also been a roller coaster ride over the past five years. The first reaction to the war was a strong rapprochement: in 2022, couples married en masse in bomb shelters, at the front or online. At the same time, divorce proceedings largely came to a standstill due to the constant air alerts. This year, 222,900 marriages were concluded and only 17,900 divorces were registered.

In 2023, the number of marriages fell to 186,100, while the number of divorces rose to 24,100. After that, things changed significantly: long separations, enormous stress, post-traumatic stress and financial difficulties put more and more relationships under pressure. In 2024, 150,200 marriages were concluded. At the same time, the total number of divorces rose to around 141,800, almost reaching the level of marriages.

It wasn't until 2025 that the ratio began to change again: for every 10 new marriages, there were 7 divorces. A similar picture emerges this year. The classic reasons for divorce have not disappeared: infidelity, alcohol, conflicts in everyday life or the interference of relatives. But the war has added new stresses - psychological exhaustion, post-traumatic stress disorder and the difficulty of finding each other again after a long separation.

This applies, for example, to families in which women have fled abroad with their children and live separately from their partners for a long time. But the return of a spouse from the front can also present a whole new set of challenges to a relationship.

Oksana Puhachova was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She has lived with her family in Latvia since the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war. She works for Latvian media such as lsm.lv and chayka.lv as well as for Estonian media such as Estonian Radio 4. She specializes in social issues in the context of the war in Ukraine. She is a participant in an Eastern Europe workshop for journalists at the taz panter foundation.

Donations to the taz panter foundation provide financial support to independent and critical journalists on site and in exile as part of the “Diary of War and Peace” project.