Oleksiy Levchenko wasn’t worried when his fiancée Anastasia Savka fell off a galloping horse during a film shoot in Kyiv, Ukraine, this summer.
He knew Ms. Savka, who was still getting used to wearing a prosthesis where her left lower leg used to be, would pick herself up and start riding again. “She has a courage no one can take from her,” Mr. Levchenko said. As befits a woman whose nickname is Sniper Phoenix, “she is fearless.”
It’s among the traits he loves best about Ms. Savka, if not the one that attracted him when they met on Jan. 23 of this year at the Superhumans Center, rehabilitation center in Lviv, Ukraine. On that day, it was her appetite that sparked his interest. “She was hungry,” he said. He was, too.
Both are veterans of Ukraine’s war with Russia. Mr. Levchenko, 29, was a soldier with the 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov, while Ms. Savka, 26, was a sniper with the 118th Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Both lost limbs in combat: Ms. Savka on Nov. 28, 2023, when she stepped on a land mine near the village of Robotyne, and Mr. Levchenko on Oct. 23, 2023, when he and a fellow soldier were struck by a rocket launcher in the woods near the eastern Ukrainian city of Kreminna.
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Neither feels superhuman, they said, the term the nonprofit rehabilitation center uses for the recovering soldiers it treats and rehabilitates. Each was motivated to take up arms for reasons more relatable: to keep their loved ones safe when Ukraine was invaded by Russia in February 2022.
Ms. Savka grew up in Lviv, the largest city in western Ukraine, with an older brother and her parents, Oksana Tarnavska and Oleg Tarnavskiy. Before clusters of army personnel started gathering to recruit and train locals in her neighborhood to defend the country in 2022, she worked in administration and management positions at area offices and automobile service stations.
In 2018, she was divorced after a brief marriage to the father of her now 6-year-old son. When the war began, she and her son were living with her parents in her childhood home when learning combat skills, including how to fire a weapon, started feeling more obligatory than optional.
“I had to protect my family and my home,” Ms. Savka said via Zoom and an interpreter from the apartment she now shares with Mr. Levchenko in Lviv. Power outages occur daily in Ukraine, so for most of the conversation, she and Mr. Levchenko huddled in the dark, with a pile of wool army blankets wrapped around their shoulders. An occasional flicker of lights revealed a crucifix on an otherwise bare wall behind them.
At the start of 2022, “I didn’t have any higher education or experience, but it was in my heart to go into the army,” she said. “I felt I had to join.” By summer, she was a trained sniper. “I definitely wanted to go and fight.”
Mr. Levchenko’s motivation to fight had been steeping longer. Growing up in the village of Korchak, in western Ukraine’s Zhytomyr region, he counted the days until he could join the military. “My way of seeing it is that every man has to serve and defend his country,” he said. He is among many Ukrainians who consider Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 the start of the war, he said through the interpreter.
In 2015, when he was old enough to enlist, he had the support of his parents, Svitlana and Sergiy Levchenko. But his mother wasn’t eager to send him off to war. “My mom knew I would get the notification I could join in the mail on my 18th birthday,” he said. He later found out that when that notification came, she hid it somewhere on the family’s 15-acre property. That wasn’t going to stop him. “I went by myself to this service place to ask where the papers were.” Within days, his documents were being processed.
By the time the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine began, he was an experienced and enthusiastic soldier. “I had no fear when we were under air attack, with missiles flying,” he said. “The only thing that scared me was stepping on mines.”
The day he was injured was supposed to be his day off. “But I decided to go with a friend to shoot against Russian positions,” he said. “We had almost accomplished our mission — we were almost done, that was the worst part — when the Russians shot twice from a rocket launcher.” The first shot broke his arm, wounded his stomach and took the lower portion of his left leg. What happened next, he barely remembers: “I had lost a lot of blood.”
Ms. Savka lost her leg when Russia launched a counterattack while she was fighting alongside a group of fellow soldiers. “We were told we’d have to find another position,” she said. On the way to safety, she stepped on the land mine with both feet. First, she felt a surge of electricity. Then came difficulty swallowing a pain pill while she was evacuated to the hospital, and the feeling that both her legs were falling off, though her right leg was salvaged.
Mr. Levchenko was no longer living at the Superhuman Center when he and Ms. Savka met in January. By then, he was mobile enough on crutches to live at a nearby hotel and commute to the center for therapy. Ms. Savka, still a resident, was using a wheelchair. She had made her way to a doctor’s appointment at a newly built Superhuman campus when Mr. Levchenko overheard her asking an administrator where she could get breakfast.
“I was also very hungry,” he said. “Too hungry to notice she was cute. I said, ‘Let’s go together and find someplace.’” They ended up at a cafe both were able to access without help. Over a full English breakfast, they talked about the war and their families. “At first I was just thinking, oh, it’s good to get acquainted with someone, to have a friend at the rehabilitation center,” she said. “But he also looked cute. I wanted to know him more.”
Three weeks later, after more breakfasts and daily hangouts around the center, Mr. Levchenko, who has a 5-year-old son and was also divorced in 2018 after a brief marriage, asked Ms. Savka to move with him to an apartment in Lviv. “It was nothing romantic,” she said. “And I didn’t find it strange because I was on the frontline with many men. It was normal to have men friends and be around men all the time.”
Mr. Levchenko had been thinking since his injury that dating would be more of a challenge with his prosthetic leg, which goes from his hip down to his feet. But he had already started falling for Ms. Savka when he asked her to move in with him. “She has a cute face, a savage temper and a kind heart,” he said. In February, over coffee at their kitchen table, he gathered his courage and asked her for a kiss.
The shift from friendship to romance fit the gradual softening of what Ms. Savka called Mr. Levchenko’s “stone face.” When they first met, “Oleksiy was in his shell, and he was aggressive, always stressed out and fiery, with this stone face,” she said. “I was the opposite. I was open with a big smile. After our talks he started to become softer and less aggressive with the world.”
By spring, they were in love and splitting their time between the apartment in Lviv, her parents’ home in Kyiv and his parents’ home in Zhytomyr. On May 3, Ms. Savka’s mother and son were in the audience for a taping of the Ukrainian TV show “I Will Never Forget” in Kyiv; Ms. Savka had been invited on to talk about her war experiences. Mr. Levchenko unexpectedly showed up with flowers and, while cameras were rolling, proposed.
Her yes led to more invitations to step in front of cameras, including the summer video shoot in Kyiv both starred in — the kind of shoot for which other couples might have asked for stunt doubles.
SOLO for Diamonds is a Ukrainian jewelry company. Its founder, Yulia Kusher, connected with Ms. Savka and Mr. Levchenko through the Superhumans Center in late spring while searching for a couple she could feature in her company’s annual charity campaign.
“We were looking for heroes, and we wanted to find a special couple,” Ms. Kusher said. The video, in which the pair also jumps in a lake with their artificial limbs while gazing into each other’s eyes to Band Tvorchi’s “Falling,” is meant to promote the black diamond engagement rings Ms. Kusher designed with them. Also, the possibilities of love amid war.
In Ukraine, “people keep saying that there is no time for a lot of ordinary things, that all you need to do is fight,” Ms. Kusher said. “Myself, Anastasia and Oleksiy wanted to remind people that we fight because we love.”
On Dec. 14, Ms. Savka and Mr. Levchenko were married at the Hyatt Regency in Kyiv. Howard G. Buffett, the son of philanthropist Warren Buffett, paid for the wedding after meeting the couple in Kyiv in November; his foundation helps support the Superhumans Center.
Oleksiy Srymenko, a representative from Kyiv’s Civilian Registry Office, officiated a 30-minute ceremony for 85 guests. Ms. Savka wore a white gown by the Ukrainian designer Pollardi and carried a black and white bouquet for her unescorted walk down the aisle. Mr. Levchenko wore a black tuxedo. After promises to support, love and respect each other for the rest of their lives, and the official nod from Mr. Srymenko that they were now married, the couple kissed amid a roomful of cheering supporters.
Fairy tale flourishes weren’t much in evidence, but the couple wanted it that way. “At the end of the day, we are a couple of soldiers who don’t care about the way it looks,” Ms. Savka said. “We just care that we are together and that there are many people who will still be alive to come to celebrate our love, and our lives.”
ON THIS DAY
When Dec. 14, 2024
Where The Hyatt Regency, Kyiv, Ukraine
Always Forever After the ceremony, guests stayed at the hotel for a reception featuring traditional Ukrainian and European dishes, plus a black and white wedding cake. The couple’s first dance was to “Cupid,” written for them by a local singer, Nikita Kiselev. Though they had been married less than an hour, and hadn’t known each other even a year, “I feel like we’ve been together our whole lives,” Ms. Savka said.
Love Among Ruins Though hotels in Ukraine mostly operate on generators, enabling them to switch to backup power during outages, there were no power outages during the ceremony or reception. A drone attack and an air raid alert during the celebration, though, kept the couple and their guests mindful of the ongoing war.
Snipers turned Students Ms. Savka and Mr. Levchenko are retired from the military but hope to become environmental professionals. Both are now full-time students at Zhytomyr Polytechnic State University studying environmental protection technologies. Each expects to graduate in May 2028.
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