Putin Versus "Gayropa"

Tuesday, February 24, is the fourth anniversary of Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. 

A lot will be written about the state of the fighting this week, and rightly so: Kyiv is running low on critical air defense munitions because of slowing shipment from its allies, and Ukrainians are enduring the coldest winter since fighting began without reliable heat, electricity, or internet. Perversely, the Trump administration continues to pressure Ukraine to “end the war” by surrendering.

There’s another event happening this February 24 that will attract far less international attention. A court in Moscow is expected to ban the St. Petersburg LGBTQ+ organization Coming Out as an “extremist organization.” This could subject its leaders to prosecution under the country’s terrorism laws. Russians have already faced charges carrying sentences of up to 10 years for offenses like running drag shows or wearing rainbow jewelry. The rainbow flag has been banned as an “extremist symbol” since 2023.

Coming Out lawyers told me it’s likely a coincidence that this hearing is being held on the war anniversary. But Russia’s war on Ukraine and its war on its own LGBTQ+ citizens are connected: Putin discovered that homophobia was a powerful tool to crush democracy within and undermine international norms. 

This history should remind us that Ukraine isn’t just fighting for itself. It’s fighting for everyone who cares about democracy. And the stakes for queer people—in Ukraine and all around the world—are especially high. 

At the same time Putin implemented its so-called “gay propaganda ban” in 2013, his allies were running a campaign in Ukraine using homophobic slogans to try to derail a major treaty between Kyiv and the EU. They gave Europe—”Europa” in Russian and Ukrainian—the derisive nickname “Gayropa.”

The Ukrainian people didn’t buy it. When Ukraine’s then-president bowed to Russian pressure and tried to withdraw from the EU treaty, he was driven from power by a mass revolution. This is when Russia started its war with Ukraine. The Russian army seized Crimea, while proxy forces won control of a large portion of Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region. 

These militias were heavily financed by a Russian oligarch named Konstantin Malofeev. And starting a war wasn’t the only thing he was up to in 2014. 

His foundation was also a major sponsor of a global summit of anti-LGBTQ+ activists held in the Kremlin that fall. The lead organizer was a Malofeev employee named Alexey Komov, who dubbed the event the “pro-Family Olympics.” It was originally intended to occur under the auspices of a US-based organization called The World Congress of Families (WCF). But the WCF was forced to drop sponsorship. Many of the group’s American backers decided it was too toxic to be associated with Putin while its army was slaughtering Ukrainians. 

"I don’t want to appear to be giving aid and comfort to Vladimir Putin," Penny Nance, president of Concerned Women for America, told me at the time. 

Oh how times have changed. Over the next 12 years, anti-LGBTQ+ activists grew closer to Russia’s orbit over the next 12 years and put aside any pretense about caring about democracy. 

The 2014 Kremlin event proceeded without the WCF banner. Invitees included close Putin confidantes, the Russian lawmaker who authored the “gay propaganda” law, and senior members of European far-right parties. Many prominent anti-LGBTQ+ activists from the US attended as well, most notably Brian Brown, founder of the National Organization of Marriage, which led efforts to ban marriage equality on the state level in the ’00s. 

By the time Trump got elected in 2016, Brian Brown assumed leadership of WCF and renamed it the International Organization for the Family. Trump’s embrace of Putin—and the attention on Russia’s efforts to sway the election for Trump—made it acceptable for the American right to join hands with Moscow once again. 

Brian Brown couldn’t get to Moscow fast enough. Weeks after Trump’s inauguration, Brown jetted off to the Russian capital to promote his group’s new manifesto. A fundraising email he putatively sent from Moscow pleaded for supporters to set aside “whatever geo-political differences might exist with some countries in eastern Europe” in favor of stronger bonds over a shared “appreciation for the natural family and the importance of a child enjoying the love of his or her married mother and father.”

At the same time, members of Russia’s legislature were welcomed at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. A Russian newspaper reported at the time that members of Putin’s United Russia Party were eager to “build tight relations” with their American counterparts on issues such as “family values.”

Over the next few years, Brown sprinted across countries important to Moscow, organizing WCF summits in partnership with far-right, pro-Russian factions in Georgia, Hungary, and Moldova. (Russia was occupying parts of both Georgia and Moldova at the time, by the way.) 

2019 took WCF to Italy, where it was hosted by the pro-Russian Lega party, which one of my former BuzzFeed colleagues revealed was running a scheme to try to funnel Russian oil money into its party coffers. 

That summit featured lawyer John Eastman, who, a year later, would help lead Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. 

When Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he made Russia the first superpower to invade another country with the express goal of crushing LGBTQ+ rights. 

The war was necessary, he said in a speech delivered the night the invasion began, to counter Western efforts to “completely destroy” Russia and its “traditional values.” 

As the Russian military razed Ukrainian cities, Russian lawmakers were hard at work tightening laws against LGBTQ+ people at home. The “gay propaganda law” was expanded in 2022, Russia criminalized gender-affirming care for trans people in July 2023, and the Supreme Court declared the LGBT movement to be “extremist” that November. Queer activists who had found ways to operate inside Russia despite earlier laws fled the country by the hundreds. 

Fortunately, Coming Out relocated its staff abroad long before the proceedings began that led to the impending “extremism” determination. Alex Voronov, who led the organization in 2022, told me it was clear “within weeks” of the start of the full-scale invasion that “it wasn’t safe to stay in Russia anymore.” 

Especially since the Russian military badly bungled the initial phase of the invasion, Voronov told me a couple years ago, the Russian government would have to find a way to shift attention away from his faults. 

“I understood that they were going to start looking for new enemies,” he said. “They’re going to look for enemies that they can beat, and LGBT is a very easy target.”

The first major arrests under the “extremism” determination targeted a drag bar in a tiny city near the Kazakh border. (Clearly a major security threat.) When I wrote about this raid for Foreign Policy in 2024, I could only find one former bar patron who wasn’t too scared to talk to me. 

The quote that stuck with me most from that interview didn’t make it into the story: 

“The club became a safe space, not only for [the queer] community but for straight people as well,” the man told me. “It was a safe space with people who were against the war, so you could go there and talk about your political views and be sure that no one would tell on you.”

In many parts of the world, queer people are free thinkers because they have already crossed their societies’ most taboo boundaries. That self-determination is fundamentally incompatible with a totalitarian regime that is too fragile to tolerate dissent. 

But it is precisely because being queer is so taboo in so many places that queer people are among the easiest targets for politicians who want to undermine democracy. It’s a way to win support for repressive policies that can be expanded to touch other dissenting groups over time: journalists, other minority groups, and so on, until there is no space left for dissent at all.

Republicans are using the same playbook as Russia. Florida’s “don’t say gay” law is basically Russia’s “gay propaganda” ban. State laws banning gender-affirming care mirror Russian’s more recent legislation. Right-wing news outlets pushed banning the trans pride flag as a symbol of “domestic terrorism” following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, an idea that Trump said he’d have “no problem” with. 

And Trump’s already used the military to topple one foreign leader, is threatening to invade Greenland, and appears ready to start a war with Iran.

When I interviewed Viktor Pylypenko, founder of Ukraine’s LGBTQ+ Military organization, for The Queer Face of War, he told me, “Ukraine is an idea.” He meant that modern Ukraine is a multiethnic, multilingual, and multifaith country bound together by shared values. “This is not a war for territory,” he said. “We are fighting to live in a free country.”

I was taught the same thing about the United States. It’s an ideal that the Trump administration doesn’t even pretend to uphold. Ukrainians are fighting a war I fear we may someday face at home. 

That’s why it’s so important that they win.

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