DONETSK, Ukraine — It was a weekend of love in this city of war.

First came the wedding.

A rebel leader wearing fatigues and a cast on his broken right arm marched into the city’s main wedding registry office on Friday with his betrothed for a marriage ceremony that was attended by several dozen armed militiamen.

The wedding, much of which was broadcast live on Russian television, was billed as the first ever registered in the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic.

But a worker in the office who was too afraid to give her name said that the staff had performed the ceremony under duress and without documents, and that the happy couple, identified as Arsen Pavlov and Elena Kolenkina by The Associated Press, was in fact not legally married under Ukrainian law.

But that did not seem to detract from the occasion. The bride wore a long white strapless dress, a veil, a gun and holster over her shoulder. Her long black hair was braided with a St. George’s ribbon, a symbol adopted by pro-Russian separatists, who have largely retreated to Donetsk and Luhansk for a last stand against the Ukrainian government forces.