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They are the joyous waterside wedding photos that tennis ace Daria Kasatkina could only have dreamed about before defecting to Australia.
As an openly gay woman in Russia, marriage was never an option. Same-sex unions were outlawed in her birth country.
But her decision to become an Australian citizen last year, a move largely driven by her sexuality, granted her greater freedoms.
It allowed the 29-year-old world No.63 to marry her Estonian fiancée, Natalia Zabiiako, in an intimate waterside ceremony in Athens, Greece, just weeks after competing at Wimbledon, where she lost to Naomi Osaka 6-1, 6-3 in the third round.
“We just had the best day ever,” Kasatkina posted on Instagram on Thursday.
“We celebrated love, freedom and acceptance. No words for now, only appreciation.”
Kasatkina and Zabiiako, an Olympic figure skater, had announced their engagement last year and shared seven pictures on social media of their wedding day, including a kiss under a neon sign, reading, “What’s the love”, while fireworks exploded in the background.
Among the guests were tennis players Mirra Andreeva, Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, Kamilla Rakhimova and Arina Rodionova.
“I was always amazed by the level of happiness there, and I was jealous of the people who live there because I have, let’s say, [contrasting] examples to compare. This is a fairytale, for sure.”
Kasatkina’s management first broached the idea of relocating to Australia in 2023 - a year after she announced in a life-changing 2022 interview that she was gay. She had also condemned Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
But the push did not gain major traction until after the 2025 Australian Open when former Tennis Australia CEO Craig Tiley and his team agreed to help make the switch happen, and to do the heavy lifting with the Department of Home Affairs.
Born in Tolyatti, Kasatkina has not set foot in Russia since her 2022 interview.
The country’s supreme court ruled in 2023 that the international LGBTQI+ movement was an extremist organisation.
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