Nastia, a complex and dynamic protagonist, initially acts on a desperate need for maternal recognition. As the daughter of the famous radical activist Iolanta Cherno, Nastia grows up in the shadow of her mother’s public persona and controversial protests. Her primary motivation is a reaction to her mother’s abandonment: She joins the international marriage industry her mother fought against, constructing her identity around her perceived rebellion. This carefully orchestrated performance is designed to provoke her mother’s return. Nastia believes that her betrayal, her transformation into the kind of woman her mother sought to “save,” is the only thing that will capture Iolanta’s attention, wishing “that her blood would turn cold” upon seeing her (32). This motivation places her squarely within the novel’s exploration of The Ambiguous Ethics of Activism, as her personal trauma fuels a public, and ultimately dangerous, stunt.

Nastia’s kidnapping plot is a grand, theatrical gesture that mirrors her mother’s own brand of activism. However, she is initially naive about the practicalities of her plan, relying heavily on her sister, Sol, to navigate social interactions and on Yeva to provide the logistical means. Her identity is fractured; she is simultaneously the cold, calculating mastermind of the heist and a vulnerable young woman grappling with abandonment. She wears the identity of a bride like armor, a role that requires her to suppress her true self, physically transforming through starvation and shapewear to fit the mold of the desirable “Ukraine Woman.” The animal mask she wears during the kidnapping is another layer of this performance, allowing her to shed her identity and enact a role of aggression that conceals her underlying fear and desperation. Her relationship with Yeva is pivotal, evolving from a manipulative attempt to use her into a dynamic of reluctant dependency and shared survival.

The Russian invasion ironically serves Nastia’s development by turning her inauthentic attempts to help Ukrainians into a genuine struggle to protect herself and others. Her plot to kidnap bachelors only endangers the three women further as the invasion encroaches on them, rendering her original mission to “destroy” the bridal industry absurd. As she, Sol, and Yeva navigate the dangers of an occupied country, Nastia is stripped of her performative layers. She learns to drive, takes on responsibility for Yeva after she is shot, and is forced to confront the potential finality of her mother’s absence. The revelation that her mother may have simply started a new life in America, rather than being a victim of the forces she fought, exemplifies the author’s use of dark humor; Iolanta finds solace in the lifestyle she condemned. Nastia’s plan of first partaking in and later protesting the industry to lure her mother in never would’ve worked. Her journey is a painful maturation from a girl defined by her mother’s legacy to an individual forged by the brutal realities of war and the bonds she forms in the struggle to survive.

Pasha serves as a protagonist whose journey is a poignant and often ironic exploration of The Struggle to Maintain a Sense of National Identity. Born in Ukraine as Pavel but raised in Canada as Paul, he is a man adrift between two cultures, belonging fully to neither. He returns to his birth country on a romance tour with a deeply romanticized mission: to shed his “paltry Paul self” (79), find a traditional Ukrainian wife, and reclaim an identity he feels was stolen from him. His initial perspective is that of a cultural tourist, idealizing Ukrainian women as his “own kind” and envisioning a life that is a corrective to his perceived failures in the West. This quest is rooted in insecurity and a sense of displacement, fueled by the pressures of his immigrant parents and his inability to achieve the Canadian dream. He evolves from a naive and self-absorbed man into a traumatized but self-aware survivor.

Being a hostage shatters Pasha’s idealistic notions. Trapped in Yeva’s mobile lab, he and the other bachelors are stripped of their status as consumers and forced into a state of shared vulnerability. His accidental escape and his direct confrontation with the brutal reality of the occupation—witnessing dismembered soldiers on the Antonivs’kyi Bridge—mark a point of no return. This traumatic encounter forces him to abandon his fantasies and engage with the war’s horrifying authenticity. His subsequent attempt to rally protesters and disrupt the Russian propaganda film presents active engagement with others as the true path to cultural reconnection. However, Reva refuses to offer a stereotypical rallying cry that embodies Ukrainian strength or resilience; Pasha blacks the memory out, overwhelmed, and the reader never learns what he said to the crowd. In doing so, she avoids projecting her idea of what “should” be said to offer her people hope; furthermore, she implies that Pasha’s relationship with Ukrainians is something innate, which only requires him to face his insecurities and be brave rather than trying to embody the “ideal” Ukrainian national identity.

In the epilogue, Pasha has reinvented himself once more, this time as “Pavlo,” an artist chronicling the war in Kherson. This final identity is not the one he set out to find but indicative of how people constantly change in response to their experiences. His art, a repetitive series of paintings of the destroyed bridge, becomes a way to process the war. His interactions with the CBC interviewer reveal a man who is cynical and confrontational, alienated from the “politeness” of the Western world he once belonged to. He has found a home in Ukraine, but it is a fraught and precarious one, defined by ongoing violence. His journey is a complete subversion of the immigrant success story, showing a return not to a peaceful homeland but to a warzone where he finally, and tragically, finds a sense of belonging.

Nastia’s older sister Solomiya, or Sol, functions as a foil to Nastia. Sol is initially presented as the pragmatic and protective sibling, grounded in reality in contrast to Nastia’s grandiose, emotionally driven schemes. As an English literature student, she possesses the linguistic and cultural knowledge necessary to act as the “ventriloquist” for Nastia’s bridal persona, not just translating Nastia’s words but crafting a desirable, malleable character for the bachelors. She joins the romance tours out of financial necessity and a desire to protect her sister, but she is deeply conflicted about their deception. Driven by practicality, she manages the logistics of their scams and later, their survival, often acting as the voice of reason when Nastia’s single-minded focus or Yeva’s erratic behavior threatens their safety.

Sol’s character arc is one of finding her own agency. Initially, she operates in a supporting role, enabling Nastia’s plans while trying to mitigate the damage. However, her frustration with being a passive bystander in her own life boils over. Her declaration, “I’m sick of not being implicated” (92), marks a crucial turning point. She moves from being a reluctant accomplice to an active co-conspirator in the kidnapping plot and, later, a key decision-maker during their flight from the invasion. While Nastia is the plan’s architect, Sol is its implementer, handling communications with the bachelors and later with Masha. She is consistently the one who must translate chaos into a semblance of order. When she destroys the Russian propaganda footage, she completes her arc into a proactive member of resistance, one capable of tangible change who protects Nastia from being cast as a traitor for her forced role in the film.

Iolanta Cherno is a pivotal, though largely absent, character whose legacy as a radical feminist activist drives much of the novel’s action. She is the founder of the protest troupe Komod, known for its topless, “sextremist” stunts targeting the patriarchy and, specifically, the international marriage industry. For her daughter Nastia, Iolanta is both an icon and a source of trauma; her public crusades resulted in prolonged absences and emotional neglect. Iolanta’s character embodies the central questions of The Ambiguous Ethics of Activism, representing a version of activism that is powerful and headline-grabbing but also morally complex and personally destructive. Her motivations are portrayed as a mixture of genuine political conviction and a stymied desire for self-expression.

The reveal of her new life in America as “Mrs. Brown,” a suburban housewife married to a former marriage agency client, ironically subverts her public identity. Her idealistic protest of marriage falls short against her genuine desire for security and emotional fulfilment. Playing on the theme of the struggle to maintain a sense of national identity, she refuses to acknowledge the sacrifice of her previous identity or her failure in leaving her daughters behind. She calls the reinvention her “final role,” a performance of domesticity; however, this inadvertently reveals that it’s just as constructed as her activist persona. Her only actual engagement with the narrative present is through an attempted call to Nastia, which her daughter ignores. Reva explores this character through a metafictional interrogation by the Yurt Makers, though this scene functions less as a literal experience and more as an attempt to navigate the complexities of activism and national identity, which can fail to allow for individual desires, needs, and failures.

A member of the same bridal tour as Pasha, Bertrand is an app developer whose confidence and charisma distinguish him from the other bachelors. Pasha quickly notes his athletic figure and ease at securing dates, reinforcing Pasha’s own insecurity. He describes how “Bertrand was in Kyiv not just to find a bride but to recruit cheap tech talent and models for social media feeds” (89), quickly tying the character into the novel’s broader commentary on commodification of cultural identity. Beyond the objectification of Ukrainian women for a homogenized, false idea of their looks and personalities, Bertrand also literally sees the women as potential tools in a money-making scheme, objects that can perform labor or generate attention for his business.

Once kidnapped, Bertrand’s misogyny and apathy toward the genuine welfare of the Ukrainians heighten. His refusal to accept the women’s assertion of a Russian invasion escalates to comedic levels of ignorance and allows Reva to explore the broader avoidance of acknowledging Russian threats, resulting in a failure to prepare for obvious and impending full-scale assault. Bertrand embodies the West’s sluggish and dismissive attitude toward Russian forces, which Reva mocks by having a soldier respond to his delusional ignorance by killing him instantly.

The bachelors function as a collective character, representing the Western demand that fuels the international romance tour industry. They are generally portrayed as naive, entitled, and seeking an idealized version of womanhood that they consider unavailable in their home countries. Initially, as targets of Nastia’s kidnapping plot, they remain a largely undifferentiated group of consumers. As hostages, however, they develop a collective consciousness, their shared predicament forcing them into a state of “fraternal calm” and misguided solidarity. They cling to delusions to cope with their terrifying situation, readily believing the war is a hoax or part of an elaborate escape room game.

After Bertrand’s sudden, violent death, the loss of their idealistic masculine figure serves as the brutal intrusion of reality. It shatters the bachelors’ collective denial and forces them, along with Pasha, to confront the authentic danger of their situation. Reva narrates how “what would remain after their time in the trailer, after they splintered back to their physical ‘homes,’ was a sense of dislocation […] as if they had died in that trailer” (307), rendering them permanently suspicious of their peaceful lives. In seeking an idealized version of Ukrainian life, they inadvertently embraced the country’s reality, permanently changed by the war while remaining comedically ignorant to their role in commodifying Ukrainians in the first place.