Putin’s homophobia has advanced LGBTQIA+ rights in Ukraine

“A brother from our community died today,” read the caption on a viral Instagram post shared by a Ukrainian LGBTQIA+ military group last week. A silhouetted image of a soldier offering a military salute to a rainbow flag paid tribute to the unnamed man, who “never had time to come out in his lifetime”.

Though publicly closeted, the man was reportedly out to close friends and was known for providing anonymous interviews to the media about his experience as a queer soldier in the Ukrainian military. The news of his life being cut short without him ever being able to ever to fully celebrate his identity served as a grim reminder about the realities faced by Ukraine’s LGBTQIA+ soldiers: the same country that they are willing to take up arms to defend does not provide them the same rights as it does their straight comrades. “Let’s cement the achievements of such anonymous boys and girls who gave their lives for a free Ukraine,” the Instagram post continued, and “legalise the right to marry”.

Ukraine became the first post-Soviet country to decriminalise homosexuality when it gained independence in 1991. But more than 30 years later, the Eastern European nation still lags on LGBTQIA+ rights and does not provide a legal pathway for state recognition of same-sex partnerships.

Russia’s war in Ukraine has brought that gap into sharp focus. Partners of LGBTQIA+ Ukrainian soldiers who are wounded — or worse, killed — in action do not have the same rights as their married heterosexual counterparts. Hospital visits, identifying the deceased or collecting state benefits are all impossible for LGBTQIA+ couples.

In March, however, equal partnership rights inched one step closer to becoming reality. That month, Ukrainian lawmaker Inna Sovsun introduced a bill to Parliament that would recognise same-sex civil partnerships and grant LGBTQIA+ civil partners the same rights as their married heterosexual counterparts.

This recent step appears to be part of a larger trend of increasing acceptance toward and rights for LGBTQIA+ Ukrainians since Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country in February 2022. Sovsun said that proposing her legislation “definitely would have taken longer” if not for the war. While the liberal lawmaker has always been a strong advocate for gender and sexuality rights, she believes the recent conflict has brought LGBTQIA+ issues to the fore and increased the likelihood that her bill will be passed.

In the summer of 2022, a petition calling for marriage equality garnered 28,000 signatures, passing the threshold needed to be considered by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. (Though the 45-year-old leader said he supported the call for action, he acknowledged that his hands were tied: the Ukrainian constitution defines marriage as a union between one man and one woman and cannot be changed during wartime.) In December, Ukraine passed a bill outlawing hate speech against sexual minorities in the media.

All this has transpired as Russian President Vladimir Putin — who has overseen a significant crackdown on LGBTQIA+ rights in his own country — has explicitly justified his invasion of Ukraine in part by invoking its sexual minorities. “Family is the union of a man and a woman,” Putin said in a February address to the Kremlin on the one-year anniversary of the war. Just 12 months earlier, he had argued that the West has “sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us”.

Sovsun believes it is no coincidence that Ukrainians are now showing more tolerance toward the LGBTQIA+ community in the face of Putin’s “extremely homophobic” government. Putin’s position, she argued, seems to have made the conditions for advancing LGBTQIA+ rights in the country less arduous. “People who used to be more friendly toward Russia … they are now saying, ‘If Russia hates gays, then we love gays.’”

This is hardly the first time Putin has appealed to “traditional values” to justify his geopolitical ambitions. During Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution in February 2014, Russian state-sponsored media sought to discredit the aspirations of Ukrainian protesters for integration with the European Union by spreading homophobic messaging. Russia’s largest newspaper claimed that demonstrations were being organised by “nationalists, anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, and homosexuals”, and warned about same-sex marriage being imposed on Ukraine if the country joined the EU. Russian media often simply referred to the movement as “Gayromaidan”.

What is different now, said Emil Edenborg, an associate professor of gender studies at Stockholm University who has tracked sexual politics in Russia throughout the 21st century, is that Putin’s anti-LGBTQIA+ stances and rhetoric have only become more radical. “You can clearly see from 2020, 2021, how it really becomes a fixation. When [Putin] speaks, especially when he talks about the war in Ukraine, there is almost always a portion dedicated to ‘traditional values’,” explained Edenborg, adding that this can at times “border on genocidal”.

Putin’s top-down state-sponsored homophobia initially posed a direct threat to Ukraine’s queer community. Just days before Russian tanks rolled across the border in February 2022, Foreign Policy noted that the military would likely carry out targeted attacks on dissidents and sexual minorities in Ukraine. At the time, most experts expected Russian forces to capture Kyiv and most of Ukraine within days.

In a November 2022 report, the Ukrainian human rights organisation Nash Svit shared that it had uncovered at least 10 cases where LGBTQIA+ Ukrainians living under Russian occupation in the country’s east had been targeted in anti-gay attacks, which included accusations of rape, sexual violence, imprisonment, assault, theft and attempted murder.

Overall, however, Ukraine’s LGBTQIA+ community has not only proved resilient but arguably gotten stronger. In the past year, a record number of Ukrainian soldiers have come out as gay, bisexual and transgender, with many of them using LGBT Military — a popular nongovernmental organisation that advocates for LGBTQIA+ soldiers — as their platform. More than 100 soldiers have so far shared their coming-out stories on the group’s 13,000-plus follower Instagram account.

“These soldiers realise their life could be interrupted any moment by a Russian bomb … so they really want to have this small period of time to live freely in their own country,” said Max Potapovych, the media manager for LGBT Military. “They have really shown sceptical [parts] of our society … to change their minds.”

Sovsun believes the increased visibility of LGBTQIA+ military members lends credibility to Ukraine’s LGBTQIA+ community writ large and has nudged some conservative members of society to become more tolerant. “Supporting the military is the national religion right now,” she said. This patriotism is even more true for more right-leaning Ukrainians. “People are like, ‘They’re fighting for us then we can’t really be speaking against them,’” she added.

These anecdotal assessments are confirmed in national polls. A survey conducted last spring by Nash Svit found that a majority of Ukrainians support both equal rights for LGBTQIA+ citizens — such as anti-discrimination laws and adoption rights — as well as same-sex marriage, a departure from 2016. Over the course of the past six years, the number of Ukrainians who hold negative attitudes toward the LGBTQIA+ community has dropped from 60% in 2016 to 38% in 2022. The number of people who hold a positive view has quadrupled. “I haven’t felt that Ukrainian queer people have ever been accepted like this before,” said Potapovych.

A knee-jerk assessment could chalk rising acceptance up to Ukraine’s younger generation, from whom the military draws most of its new recruits and which has a more progressive tilt than older generations who grew up in the Soviet Union. But Vitalii Tsariuk, a 31-year-old activist living in Odesa who has been involved in tracking hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ Ukrainians for the past decade, pushed back against that assumption.

Largely thanks to Putin’s megaphoning of grievances against the LGBTQIA+ community, he said coming out — particularly for those on the battlefield — is almost viewed as an attack against the invading army. And that has seemed to have a positive effect on society at large. The “military is the most respectful sphere in social society,” Tsariuk said, adding that out soldiers have helped more conservative members of society, who might not be aware of any LGBTQIA+ persons in their lives, become more tolerant.

Sovsun admits that Ukraine still has a long way to go when it comes to its equal rights battle. Within hours of registering the civil partnership bill, her inbox received an onslaught of threatening messages that continued for days. But even for those parts of society opposed to civil unions now, she quips that Putin’s anti-LGBTQIA+ rhetoric will continue to be the wind at her back and that of other LGBTQIA+ rights activists.

Meanwhile, Russian aggression has only heightened Ukraine’s EU membership ambitions. “I think actually Putin did a good job saying that European values are about gays,” Sovsun said. “Whenever he uses the ‘EU’, ‘European’ or ‘gayropa’ he almost always means LGBTQ rights.” Ukrainian national support for joining the EU stands at a record high: a January poll conducted by the National Democratic Institute found that 92% of Ukrainians support the country’s candidacy for the bloc.

“For people who were maybe once not so Europe-oriented but have now switched their geopolitical thinking [to support joining the EU], it also came with the added bonus of more tolerance toward the LGBTQ community,” Sovsun explained. And though that is not necessarily the ideal picture of tolerance that activists would like to see, for now, it is helping them achieve their longer-term goals of LGBTQIA+ rights. “Even if the motivation for the Ukrainians to be tolerant is just because we want to be in European Union, let it be,” said Tsariuk. “I don’t see the problem.”

Though the news of the unknown gay soldier’s death last week has devastated Ukraine’s LGBTQIA+ community, it has also had the knock-on effect of further rallying support behind a new petition that calls on Zelenskyy to “make every effort to promote” the adoption of Sovsun’s civil union bill. Since March 28, online appeal has already collected more than 18,973 signatures out of the 25,000 required to pass the president’s desk for consideration. If the bill reaches his office, Zelensky may find Sovsun’s stump speech on the legislation particularly compelling: “I’m always saying that, look, Putin would really hate it.”