The wedding of Olha Shevchenko and Mykyta Pukhkan earlier this September was unique. It was online.

The couple was among the first to marry using a Ukrainian-developed Diia mobile application.

“One day in May, my husband saw a notification about the beta version in Diia, which offered an online wedding service. It looked a little unusual... But we risked it,” Shevchenko told the Kyiv Independent.

“We were planning to get married. Maybe not this year, maybe not with the current situation in the country, but we did.”

Dubbed "the country in the smartphone," the Diia mobile app was launched by the Digital Transformation Ministry in 2020. As of early August, it included some 130 services and is used by more than 20 million Ukrainians, according to the officials.

People can access various official documents, including their passport, driver's license, or vehicle registration. It is also allows to skip queues and register a business, or pay taxes within a few clicks.

Another service, officially marrying, was added this September after several months of testing, with Ukraine becoming the first country to have such a practice fully digitalized.

Ukrainians can apply, propose, and get married online by choosing a place and date. To do this, a couple can be in the same place or hundreds of kilometers apart.

Shevchenko and Pukhkan, both in their 20s, were sitting in a cafe in the town of Izmail in southern Odesa Oblast when they became newlyweds within a few minutes. Looking at their phone screens, they listened to the registrar conducting the ceremony via video and then put a digital signature to confirm the marriage.

“The ceremony was perfect. Even though there was an air raid alert and a power outage all day,” Shevchenko said.

According to the Digital Transformation Ministry, as of Sept. 20, 251 couples had gotten married in Diia, and 3,200 had applied for marriage online. Almost 830,000 proposals were recorded, with 106,000 people saying “yes.”

“This service is unique. Some countries have tried to test similar services, and some states have implemented them in the U.S. However, such a comprehensive service, which completely closes the entire (marriage) cycle online and then generates a document, the original of which can be received at the post office, is a unique feature,” Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said on national television.

Marriage and war

Legalizing online marriage in Ukraine came out of necessity. Since the start of the full-scale war, nearly a million people have been defending the country.

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion, the number of marriages in Ukraine hit 222,890 in 2022, outpacing the previous two years, according to the Justice Ministry. But in 2023, the number of marriages dropped to 186,051, and divorces increased.

Over the past 10 years, the number of new families in Ukraine has decreased by 1.6 times, according to the Opendatabot monitoring service.

Following the start of an all-out war, Ukraine’s parliament simplified the marriage procedure during martial law by allowing military personnel to marry remotely.

Through the app, soldiers can now get married to their loved ones while on the front line.

“For Ukrainians, this is no time for tons of bureaucracy,” Vitalii Tsariuk told the Kyiv Independent. “And if at least marriages are available online, then it's even better because there are many people who are far away, who can't come here and now.”

Equal rights under fire

However, as getting married is simplified for some, for others it remains an unachievable goal.

Tsariuk and his partner Viktor applied for marriage as soon as the demo version of the online proposal feature was launched in February 2023. They knew that it would not be approved, but Tsariuk saw this step as another opportunity to remind society about the need to pass legislation to legalize same-sex marriages.

Same-sex marriage is illegal in Ukraine and a bill to recognize civil partnerships as an alternative has been stuck in parliament since last year due to opposition from lawmakers.

Allowing civil partnerships would provide the LGBTQ+ community with a number of rights that are now available only to heterosexual couples. Among them is the right to allow the partner to receive the body for burial in case of death.

With Ukrainian soldiers under fire and the country’s cities pounded by Russian missiles, such a right is the most pressing.

“If people are not interested in this topic, they do not know. And if we do not tell them, they will not know. Therefore, it is not even about homophobia, it is more about making people more aware,” he said.

At present, Ukrainian LGBTQ+ couples cannot apply for marriage in the state app, facing an “error” and a demand to be a man and a woman. But they can propose to their partners, a feature that some couples have taken to show their love to one another.

“Diia is basically ready to register same-sex couples, and Diia, like all of us, is just waiting for the adoption of laws that allow same-sex couples to do so,” Tsariuk joked.

Anna Donets contributed to the reporting