Trying An Invasion in Ukraine Putin Starts an Ideological War Vs LGBTQ People

 

by Finbarr Toesland 

 

Years before Putin’s troops first fired on Ukraine, Russia began an ideological war against the LGBTQ+ community. Now, the community on both sides is paying the price 

Reports of conflict and civil unrest across the world continue to dominate the news agenda. There’s no question the horrors of war can impact anyone, but LGBTQ+ people caught up in them can be disproportionately affected due to added challenges that others simply don’t have to contend with. As the second anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine approaches, Russia is continuing its war of ideology as well as weapons as it attempts to stir up anti-LGBTQ+ feeling at home. In order to consolidate power and create a common enemy, it is scapegoating and targeting queer people — with repercussions for Ukrainian as well as Russian members of the LGBTQ+ community. 

Despite homosexuality being legalized in Russia in 1993, following the fall of the Soviet Union two years before, Russia has been strengthening its anti-LGBTQ+ stance for years now. Even before its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, members of LGBTQ+ communities in Russia had to contend with an increasingly hostile environment. From the infamous federal law banning ‘gay propaganda’ among minors in 2013 to the series of anti-gay purges in the Russian republic of Chechnya in 2017, any variations from so-called ‘traditional values’ are viewed with disdain in the Federation. 

Efforts by Russian President Vladimir Putin to consolidate power in the aftermath of the 2022 escalation of the Russian-Ukrainian war saw a heightened crackdown on independent media, human rights organizations, and LGBTQ+ activists. That year saw Sphere Foundation, Russia’s biggest gay rights organization, shut down by a court in St Petersburg after being accused of sharing LGBTQ+ views that go against traditional values. 

“The prosecution said we were undermining the moral foundations of Russian society for our work,” explains Dilya Gafurova, head of Sphere Foundation. “Our legal entity in Russia, all the history and all those years of work, it all crumbled. It didn’t exist anymore.” In Gafurova’s view, Russian political leadership has doubled down on repressive measures against human rights activists and introduced homophobic social policies since the full-scale war as a means to increase the control it has over the Russian people. “If you can control what’s happening, then it’s not going to crumble under you, even if your situation is very precarious,” she says. 

Russian propaganda has continually attempted to portray the war of aggression against Ukraine as a protective measure to rid the country of neo-Nazis and of so-called Western influences, including LGBTQ+ rights. For Gafurova, it’s no surprise that shortly after the start of the full-scale invasion, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill called the war against Ukraine a “metaphysical” mission to oppose LGBTQ+ rights. Kirill previously compared gay marriage to laws introduced by the Nazi government in Germany. “It’s one of the major rhetorical lines that the government has been pushing: ‘We don’t want something like this to happen on our borders and it’s already been seeping into our country.’ That’s why they say they are fighting the evil at its root,” explains Gafurova. 

No longer safe to live in Russia, Gafurova was forced to stop visiting the country in November 2023, when Russia’s Supreme Court ruled that the “international LGBT movement” was an “extremist organization”. “These new, let’s say, developments, are much worse than anything we’ve ever experienced. And the worst thing is, there’s no precedent for this — we don’t know how exactly to navigate this,” she says. 

The purposefully ambiguous scope of the ruling that calls the “international LGBT movement” extremist is causing widespread concern among queer people in Russia, as it could lead to anything from the prosecution of activists to fines for people who don’t hide their sexual identity. “We have a set of vulnerable people from rural areas in Russia where, if you’re a queer person, everybody knows about you,” she says. “When the police are going to be investigating who belongs to this ‘extremist’ movement, probably they’re going to be questioning you.” 

 As bizarre as it sounds, the vagueness of the ban on the “international LGBT movement” has led to LGBTQ+ Russians reaching out to Sphere to ask if it’s still safe to follow the organization on social media, and even if watching videos of Lady Gaga will fall under the ban. “People really don’t know how this is going to be applied to their everyday lives, and they’re even afraid of watching something that could be considered ‘too gay’.”

Perhaps the most vulnerable group, according to Gafurova, are the queer families with children who remain in Russia. While in the past Sphere was successful in arguing against cases when somebody tried to remove a child from a same-sex couple for no reason, Gafurova doesn’t believe it would be possible to win those cases today, even if the case was watertight. “They have their whole lives built in the country. It’s not so easy for them to just up and leave.” 

A toxic combination of increasingly violent rhetoric from prominent political and religious figures and the introduction of discriminatory laws since the war escalated make it an immensely challenging time to be LGBTQ+ in Russia. “I’m very much afraid that those [LGBTQ+ people] who remain in Russia will have to hide very important parts of themselves. Some might even have to go back into the closet. This is truly heartbreaking to watch. 

Escalating anti-gay feelings in Russia has meant that LGBTQ+ Ukrainians are also paying the price. Since the war began, extrajudicial killings and vicious physical attacks on predominantly gay men and lesbian women, motivated by homophobia, are alleged to have been carried out by Russian armed forces. 

Across Ukraine, tens of thousands of civilians have been killed and injured by Russian forces since the invasion began, according to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). More than 100,000 potential war crimes have been identified by Ukrainian authorities, with hundreds of anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes being recorded by Nash Mir (Our World) Gay and Lesbian Centre in Luhansk, southern Ukraine. The organization has set up a network of people who work to identify and record anti-LGBTQ+ attacks. They operate across the whole of the country, including within occupied areas under Russian control. These monitors can provide psychological support to LGBTQ+ war crime victims and report human rights abuses to prosecutors. Of the dozens of reports seen by Attitude, many make for extremely difficult reading.

In the southern port city of Kherson, Russian occupying forces are accused of attacking two men who had just received antiretroviral therapy at a medical center in March 2022. A Russian military patrol stopped 34-year-old Slava and 38-year-old Ihor to check their documents and to search them when they discovered their medications. The victims were forced to explain what it was for. At this point, the soldiers came to the conclusion that the men were gay and started to assault them verbally and physically. “One of the occupiers said, ‘You are HIV positive: you are faggots?’” reads the report. “They began to push them with the butts of assault rifles; they took the last 200 UAH [£4.20]. They said that they are busy now, and if they see them again, they will be raped the way they like. They threatened them with weapons, said that such people should be shot, and if they do this, they will only be thanked for this,” the report continues. 

Kadyrovtsy militants, named after their notorious leader Ramzan Kadyrov, have been accused of numerous war crimes in Ukraine, and their brutal treatment of civilians is well documented. A case from August 2022, when a group of Kadyrovtsy fighters from Chechnya are alleged to have murdered a gay man and carried out multiple rapes against young men in Kherson, according to those monitoring hate crimes, illustrates the difficulties in collecting details about suspected LGBTQ+ war crimes. The victims did not seek help from the police or other authorities because the crimes were committed when Kherson was under Russian occupation. Attitude has not been able to independently verify these attacks. We understand that Kadyrov’s men, under the pretext of checking documents, allegedly picked out some young men in a park where local teenage boys often hang out and took them one by one to their barracks. There they were said to have been subjected to sexual violence: stripped, urinated on, gun barrels forced into different parts of their bodies and gang-raped. In the morning, they were left outside, near the dormitory.

All victims are reported to have sustained serious physical and psychological injuries. According to Nash Mir, the victims of this vicious attack were Valentin, 20, Stanislav, 21, Oleksandr, 21, as well as Anton, 19, who later made a suicide attempt and survived, and Sergey, 19, who died by suicide after the attack. Some of the surviving victims left Kherson, and none of them reported these war crimes directly, due to the trauma of reliving their experiences and fears they would be seen as victims of sexual assault. 

When Andrii Kravchuk (pictured opposite), a Ukrainian activist and one of the founders of Nash Mir, first read the reports of these alleged war crimes in Kherson, it struck him how brutal they were. “They committed those crimes as an intense intimidation tactic against Ukrainian boys and men,” he said.

The only positive to be found in this situation is that as Russia has escalated its anti-LGBTQ+ stance, the wider society in Ukraine appears to be becoming more tolerant. In a 2023 survey by Nash Mir, more than two-thirds of respondents said they feel positive about the participation of LGBTQ+ people in defending Ukraine from Russian aggression, with all metrics of attitudes towards queer people in Ukraine improving. This is being put down to the increasing prominence of LGBTQ+ soldiers in the fight against Russia. 

The rapid change in opinion towards the community came as a surprise to Kravchuk, who has worked for equal rights in Ukraine for decades. “I didn’t believe my own eyes, and even sociologists who conducted the research didn’t believe the results. The situation is changing very, very fast,” he says. 

As Russia’s government has so closely linked the physical war to an ideological struggle against liberalism and Western values, Ukrainian politicians risk playing into Putin’s narrative if they aggressively rally against LGBTQ+ rights. “Neither our churches nor mainstream politicians can afford to be openly pro-Russian and support this narrative of their international counterparts,” says Kravchuk.

 

Yet while the majority of Ukrainians say they support equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, according to results from several recent surveys, when asked about specific rights such as same-sex marriage, many Ukrainians remain opposed to core equal rights. 

There can be no doubt that in times of war, members of the LGBTQ+ community can find themselves in even more danger as they are singled out by hostile regimes and doubly marginalized. 

For James Longman (pictured left), an openly gay foreign correspondent for US network ABC News, covering the lives of LGBTQ+ refugees fleeing from the Syrian civil war was the moment that woke him up to the immense challenges our community can face in times of conflict. “I met a young gay man in Lebanon, who had fled ISIS in the north of Syria, and he probably hadn’t come across a person who he would regard as in a position of authority or a member of the media who was gay,” says Longman. 

While many refugees displaced by war or conflict can connect with a cultural, religious or family support network, LGBTQ+ refugees may not only lack these networks to rely on, but these may be the same people who had hunted them down in their country of origin. “The man I spoke to in Lebanon, his uncle had told a local ISIS representative about him. He had been arrested as a result of his uncle shopping him to ISIS,” says Longman. 

Thanks to his extensive reporting — including on the gay purges in Chechen — Longman has a perspective on the global situation of LGBTQ+ rights that few people possess. “It’s easy for people in Britain to think that LGBTQ+ rights are done — that we’ve ticked that box. But, actually, if you look around the rest of the world, things genuinely are going backward in a great many places,” he says. In the more than 60 countries worldwide where homosexuality is illegal, being openly gay can equal abuse, disgust, and even death. “There’s a level of ignorance about the lives of gay and lesbian people around the world who are not part of smaller groups who are having a really, really hard time.”

Attitude Magazine