Dating Under Air-Raid Conditions: A Foreigner’s Guide to Falling in Love in Ukraine

By Matthew Parish

Thursday 8 October 2026

There comes a moment in the life of almost every foreign man who has spent too long in wartime Ukraine when he begins to entertain an exceptionally dangerous thought. He wonders whether a Ukrainian woman might actually take him seriously.

This is considerably more hazardous than travelling to Kharkiv during an air-raid alert. At least with Russian missiles there are Telegram channels, maps, estimated trajectories and occasionally even advance warning. With Ukrainian women, there is generally none of this useful intelligence, and the foreigner must proceed into the darkness relying upon instinct, optimism and the occasional cryptic message containing a single emoji.

I have spent enough time in Ukraine to understand that the principal mistake foreigners make is believing they understand anything at all. This applies to Ukrainian politics, military affairs, bureaucracy, railway timetables and, with particular force, women. A foreign man may arrive equipped with considerable education, professional experience and sophisticated theories about international relations, only to discover that none of these qualifications enables him to determine whether “maybe” means yes, no, never, tomorrow, after the war or “please stop asking ridiculous questions”.

Nevertheless, hope survives. It has survived worse things in Ukraine.

The foreigner arrives

The foreign man initially possesses certain advantages, or at least he imagines that he does. He is unusual. He has stories from elsewhere. He may speak with an entertaining accent, possess a foreign passport and know how to order wine without pointing nervously at the menu.

Unfortunately these advantages depreciate rapidly.

Ukraine has now accumulated foreigners of every conceivable variety: journalists, diplomats, volunteers, soldiers, businessmen, humanitarian workers, intelligence enthusiasts, political tourists, adventurers and mysterious middle-aged men who appear in hotel bars claiming to be involved in “security” but become strangely evasive when asked what this means. Merely being British, French, German or American is no longer sufficient to render a man exotic. There are too many of us wandering around.

The Ukrainian woman therefore has every reason to inspect the foreigner with suspicion. She may reasonably wonder whether he is genuinely living in Ukraine or merely passing through it, accumulating photographs, anecdotes and romantic experiences before returning to a peaceful suburb somewhere west of Warsaw.

She may also ask the most terrifying question of all: what exactly is he doing here?

The foreigner should prepare carefully before answering this question. “It is complicated” may be truthful, but it is not reassuring.

Are you actually staying?

The central problem is not nationality but permanence. A Ukrainian woman contemplating a serious relationship with a foreign man knows something he may prefer not to think about: he possesses an emergency exit.

When the electricity disappears, the missiles arrive or the geopolitical situation deteriorates, he can theoretically leave. He can travel westwards, produce his passport and eventually arrive somewhere in which the principal evening hazard is an overpriced restaurant.

She may not have the same psychological option. Even if she possesses every legal right to travel, Ukraine contains her family, friendships, memories, obligations and identity. Leaving one’s country is not the same thing as taking a holiday from it.

Therefore the question lurking beneath any serious relationship is brutally simple. Will you still be here when things become unpleasant?

The foreign man may reply indignantly that things are already unpleasant. He has endured air-raid alerts, power cuts, curfews and Ukrainian Railways announcing a delay with the serene confidence of an institution that knows everybody will wait anyway.

But Ukrainians understand that there are degrees of unpleasantness. They have developed an extraordinarily sophisticated scale.

Romance beneath the sirens

War does peculiar things to courtship. In London, Paris or Berlin, a romantic evening might involve dinner followed by drinks and a taxi home. In Ukraine it may involve dinner, an air-raid alert, a discussion about whether the restaurant’s basement is genuinely a shelter and a taxi driver explaining that he cannot take the most direct route because something has just exploded there.

This ought to destroy romance. Curiously, it often does the opposite.

War compresses emotional time. People become close quickly because the ordinary pretences of peaceful life are difficult to maintain when you are sitting together at three in the morning listening to explosions. One discovers rapidly whether another person becomes calm, hysterical, practical, philosophical or merely annoyed that the blast woke her up.

The foreigner may be alarmed. His Ukrainian companion may glance at her telephone and announce, “It is far away.”

“How far?”

“Maybe five kilometres.”

The foreigner then discovers that definitions of distance are culturally contingent.

Ukrainian women do not require rescuing

Another danger is the foreign man’s temptation to imagine himself as a rescuer. This fantasy should be extinguished immediately, preferably before somebody laughs at him.

Ukrainian women have spent years navigating conditions that many Western Europeans would regard as grounds for immediate governmental collapse. They have managed businesses during blackouts, moved children across borders, volunteered near front lines, organised humanitarian assistance, supported relatives serving in the Armed Forces, rebuilt homes and gone to work the morning after missile strikes.

Against this background, the arrival of a foreign man announcing that he has come to save everybody may not generate quite the reaction he anticipates.

Indeed, the relationship may rapidly develop in the opposite direction. The foreigner may discover that he is the person being instructed where to stand during an air raid, which application to download, which taxi driver not to trust and why under no circumstances he should buy whatever mysterious homemade alcoholic substance somebody has just offered him.

This is probably healthy. A relationship based upon two adults liking one another has better prospects than one based upon a confused foreigner imagining himself to be Lawrence of Arabia.

The problem of suspicion

There is nevertheless an elephant sitting quietly at the romantic dinner table. Both parties may wonder about the other’s motives.

The foreigner may ask himself whether she is interested in him or in the world his passport represents. She may ask herself whether he is interested in her or in some fantasy about Ukrainian women constructed from dubious corners of the internet.

Both suspicions can be deeply insulting. Both can also occasionally be justified.

Fortunately time performs excellent counter-intelligence work. People cannot maintain elaborate romantic cover stories indefinitely. Eventually everyone becomes tired.

The decisive evidence is therefore mundane. Does she still want to see him when there is no expensive restaurant involved? Does he remain interested when she is exhausted, irritable and emphatically uninterested in discussing geopolitics? Can they spend an evening together without Ukraine’s strategic future becoming the principal subject of conversation?

Most importantly, can they survive assembling furniture together?

Any relationship that survives flat-pack furniture during a blackout should probably be recognised by international treaty.

The great cultural misunderstanding

A foreign man may believe that his greatest difficulty will be learning Ukrainian. He soon discovers that his greater difficulty is learning Ukrainian silence.

This is an advanced language containing numerous grammatical forms. There is the ordinary silence, the tired silence, the irritated silence, the affectionate silence, the “you have said something exceptionally stupid and I am deciding whether to explain why” silence and the particularly dangerous silence accompanied by the words “everything is fine”.

Foreign diplomats spend years studying regional languages. They should devote more resources to this.

The British man faces particular difficulties because his own culture depends upon expressing important emotions through understatement. He may describe a missile strike as “slightly concerning” and falling desperately in love as “rather fond of her”. The Ukrainian woman may reasonably conclude that he is either emotionally defective or suffering from concussion.

Communication therefore becomes an exercise in bilateral diplomacy. Fortunately, unlike international diplomacy, it occasionally works.

Kharkiv and the test of commitment

There is also geography. Relationships feel different in Lviv, Kyiv, Odesa and Kharkiv because the war feels different in each of these places.

Lviv can occasionally permit the foreigner to indulge the fantasy that he is living in an unusually eccentric Central European city with beautiful architecture, excellent coffee and periodic interruptions from Russian cruise missiles. Kharkiv is less inclined to sustain illusions.

If a woman lives in or belongs to eastern Ukraine, the foreign man’s willingness to understand that world may matter more than any romantic declaration. It is easy to love somebody over cocktails in Lviv. It is a somewhat different proposition when the conversation is interrupted by the sound of something extremely expensive exploding.

This does not mean that bravery is attractive in itself. Performative bravery is generally tiresome, and Ukrainians possess excellent detectors for it.

The more persuasive quality is steadiness. Do you remain essentially the same person when the environment becomes frightening? Can you be useful without making a performance of usefulness? Can you recognise when somebody needs help and when she simply wants you to stop fussing?

The last of these may be the hardest lesson.

The foreigner’s fatal error

Eventually the foreign man commits the classic mistake. He tries to define the relationship.

This seems perfectly reasonable. He has survived explosions, linguistic misunderstandings, Ukrainian bureaucracy and perhaps even meeting her friends. Surely he is entitled to know what is happening.

He therefore asks.

The answer may be something like, “Why do we need to talk about this?”

At this point he realises that he has successfully navigated a country at war only to walk directly into an emotional minefield.

Perhaps the relationship is obvious to her. Perhaps it is not obvious at all. Perhaps she is protecting herself because war has taught her not to trust permanence. Perhaps she likes him enormously but cannot imagine a future while next month remains uncertain. Perhaps she is simply considering whether he is an idiot.

The last possibility should never be excluded.

The invisible rival

The foreign man must also understand that he is competing for attention with something infinitely more powerful than another man. He is competing with Ukraine.

Ukraine is an extraordinarily demanding partner. It requires attention at all hours, generates emergencies without notice and interrupts dinner with alarming regularity. It demands loyalty, money, patience and emotional energy.

A Ukrainian woman may have relatives at the front, displaced friends, elderly parents, professional responsibilities and a permanent background awareness that somebody she loves may be in danger. The foreigner who becomes jealous of these obligations will not remain attractive for long.

He cannot ask to be more important than the war. He can only hope to become important within the life the war has created.

That distinction is everything.

What happens when the war ends?

There is an even more unsettling question. Suppose the relationship survives the war. What then?

Wartime romance has magnificent scenery. There are midnight trains, blacked-out cities, dramatic reunions, candlelit evenings and the knowledge that tomorrow is never guaranteed. Peace may eventually replace these things with supermarket shopping, tax returns and arguments about whose turn it is to clean the bathroom.

Would they still love one another then?

This is perhaps the real test. If the foreign man loves only Ukraine at war, then he does not really love Ukraine. If he loves only the woman illuminated by the extraordinary intensity of wartime life, he may not really love her either.

Serious love requires an appetite for boredom. It means wanting the person after the air-raid sirens have stopped, when the lights remain permanently switched on and when nobody checks a missile-monitoring channel before deciding whether to order dessert.

It means wanting Tuesday afternoon.

So, would she?

Would a Ukrainian woman seriously contemplate a relationship with a foreign man during wartime? Certainly she might, although the foreign man would be wise not to congratulate himself prematurely.

She may appreciate that he came to Ukraine. She will probably care rather more about whether he stays when staying becomes inconvenient. She may enjoy his foreignness initially, but if the relationship develops then his nationality will eventually become about as interesting as the manufacturer of his refrigerator.

This is progress.

The moment she stops thinking of him primarily as “the foreigner” may be the moment something serious becomes possible. Equally, the moment he stops thinking of her primarily as “a Ukrainian woman” and begins thinking of her simply as the maddening, funny, intelligent, complicated individual whose messages he checks far too frequently, he may finally have understood what he is doing.

Neither of them can promise what happens next. Nobody in Ukraine can make such promises with much confidence.

But perhaps that is precisely why relationships continue to begin here. War strips away the comfortable assumption that life will wait until everybody has made sensible arrangements. It reminds people that affection deferred indefinitely may become affection never expressed.

So people meet. They flirt. They misunderstand one another spectacularly. They argue, reconcile, drink wine, miss trains, hide from missiles and sometimes fall in love.

The foreign man may eventually discover that this is the strangest feature of wartime Ukraine. Amid all the machinery devoted to destroying human life, people remain stubbornly determined to construct new lives with one another.

And if a Ukrainian woman eventually decides that she wants to construct part of hers with him, he should probably resist the temptation to analyse the matter any further.

He has already been extraordinarily lucky.