Oleksandr “Teren” Budko sits backstage at a filming location of The Bachelor. Photo / Washington Post
The man has an easy smile, the women are gorgeously dressed, and generators fend off the blackouts with air raid shelters nearby.
Backstage at Ukraine’s adaption of The Bachelor, makeup artists rushed to fix fake lashes and lipstick, while producers hunched over monitors and adjusted camera angles. For the crew of 200 and the show’s 21 participants, the night was going to be a particularly gruelling shoot.
The strict wartime curfew and rolling power cuts in the wake of sustained Russian strikes on Ukraine’s power grid meant they would have to film the show’s climactic rose ceremony – in which contestants choose to accept or reject a second date – all through the night, from dusk until dawn.
Women draped in long black tulle and red satin tottered around in glittering stilettos, clutching bags of McDonald’s and milkshakes. The smell of hair spray and perfume hung in the air. Outside, the production company’s massive mobile generator whirred.
The show had been lucky to score this location for the shoot: a sprawling lodge in the forests outside Kyiv with its own emergency power system and plenty of shelter if the air raid sirens started.
As with every aspect of life in Ukraine, the full-scale invasion in 2022 by Russia has transformed the contest, once the most-watched reality TV show in Ukraine. Forty per cent of the camera and lights team was drafted to fight. Curfew restricted working hours so most of the dating scenes have to be filmed during the day instead of at night and gone are the exotic foreign shooting locations.
But the main change is the profiles of the participants – and this year’s bachelor.
Enter Oleksandr Budko. Classically handsome, with sandy hair and blue eyes. He rides a sleek, black motorcycle and has tattoos and an easy smile. He is also a former platoon commander in Ukraine’s Carpathian Sich 49th Infantry Battalion – and a double amputee.
In August 2022, Budko, now 28, whose call sign is Teren, lost both his legs when a missile hit his battalion’s trench in the Kharkiv region.
“It was extremely painful. I looked down and saw that one leg had almost gone and the other … was just a mess of army boots, flesh and earth,” he recalled.
While the Government does not share data on military casualties, the Ukrainian Ministry of Social Policy said the number of people living with a disability increased by 300,000 over the first 18 months of the war, bringing the country’s total to 3 million. Many soldiers return from the front having lost limbs and requiring prostheses. Often, the injuries are life-changing.
Wounded soldiers are publicly hailed as heroes. But in private, they must navigate the complicated ways their injuries have changed their bodies, minds and love lives. Ukraine also has a poor track record on disability rights, and public spaces are generally inadequate for people with mobility issues.
Budko was determined not to let the loss of his legs limit his horizons. He started actively advocating for more accessibility and disability rights. He published a war memoir, The Story of the Stubborn Man; performed with the United Ukrainian Ballet in California; and won bronze for swimming at the Invictus Games, the international sports competition for wounded veterans founded by Prince Harry a decade ago.
It was at the games last year that he was approached by producers of The Bachelor, who were scouting for a leading man for their next season. Half-jokingly, then seriously, they suggested he consider becoming their next bachelor.
“I realised that this is a very cool and powerful opportunity,” Budko said in an interview. “I had never watched it before, but I saw that one episode alone gets millions of views … and through this show, you can highlight important topics and plant a seed of understanding and responsibility in people’s minds.”
Budko hopes to show veterans and those injured in the war that they should not be afraid, as well as fight the social stigma against soldiers returning from the front, who are often characterised as heavy-drinking, traumatised victims and troublemakers.
“I want to show that people who have been seriously injured after the war are living their best lives and that they have absolutely equal opportunities, sometimes even more opportunities, because these people are now even more proactive and want to take opportunities from life even more,” said Budko, who moves easily through the show on a pair of prosthetic limbs.
The invasion threw the fate of the show into question. Its latest season, filmed before the war, had yet to air – and was put on hold after the Russian troops poured into Ukraine. The show’s audience was now totally preoccupied with the daily grind and tragedy of the conflict, which every day was taking more lives, destroying more homes, maiming more people. This seemed hardly the moment for a reality TV show about finding love.
Or was it?
With Ukrainian society forced to radically reshape itself into a wartime country, and with morale fading and fatigue growing, perhaps this was exactly the time for a moment of escapism.
Anna Kalina, who joined the studio in 2014 just as Russia annexed Crimea and led 10 seasons of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette equivalent, was immediately struck by Budko and his charisma.
“He is the king of a first impression,” she said, grinning. “The bachelor is not just the most handsome or desirable man for all women in the country. He must also be a hero for the country and a hero of the time in which we are filming.”
Budko is set to be the series’s first bachelor with disabilities. All those working on the season – which started airing on Friday – are excited for an opportunity to redefine beauty norms, not just in wartime Ukraine but for the world.
Many of this season’s female contestants said they hoped to set an example for Ukrainian women; they wanted to show that sex and relationships with injured soldiers and amputees are possible – and no big deal.
Veronika, 28, an art therapist from Kherson, who survived months under Russian occupation, said she wants to show other women “that it’s normal” and it was why she wanted to participate in the show. The showrunners insisted the contestants give only their first names.
“It’s important to me to be on the show, to show Ukrainian women that amputees and veterans can also be beautiful,” she said. “Oleksandr is a great example of how you can have a traumatic experience and still carry on.”
Dating during the war while navigating personal tragedies and trauma, Veronika said, had been difficult. She herself endured crossing Russian checkpoints in the early months of her war, each time believing she’d be shot, before a hair-raising escape from Kherson with her family.
“It’s very difficult to find a man now,” she said. “The demographic situation was bad before. There were already more women than men. Now so many men are dying, and those who come back have PTSD and psychological problems or injuries.”
Svitlana, 24, an officer in the Ukrainian Army who will participate in this season of The Bachelor, said now she can only date men who are serving or have served in the armed forces.
“I’ve been very preoccupied with serving the armed forces, and I didn’t have time for my personal life,” said Svitlana, who has been in the army for seven years. Her husband, also a soldier, was killed fighting in March 2022, in the first month of the war.
Joking that there wasn’t so much difference between life on the front and fighting with the other women for the attention of a man, Svitlana said it had been “difficult to connect” with some of the women who were not that focused on the war.
“My experience is very different from their civilian experience. There is a gap in values and understanding what is going on,” she said. Connection and understanding are the cornerstone of every relationship, after all.
“It was important to me that Oleksandr had served, that he’s fighting for Ukraine and for our values,” she said. “He’s a man of our time.”
And that current moment in Ukraine, said producers, is difficult to navigate. Kalina, the showrunner, acknowledged that producing this new season during the war had been “a really complex dance of trying to show normality when absolutely nothing is normal”.
“The one thing I want Ukrainian audiences to understand is, it’s always time for love,” she said. “A lot of Ukrainians think that in war it’s time to cancel everything except for being involved in the war. Love, sex, pleasure: What makes you happy as a person helps you to fight the enemy.”
The comedian and screen icon is set to make his NZ stand-up debut this July.