LGBTQ+ Ukrainians ‘still queer’ as Russia tries to ‘wipe them out’ | World News

Edward Reese, 37, was fast asleep when the bombs pelted his home in Kyiv, Ukraine, on February 24 2022. He was exhausted.

The last thing Edward, the communications coordinator of the capital city’s LGBTQ+ Pride group, did before going to bed was tune in to a speech from Russian President Vladimir Putin.

‘I was very angry and I was very tired because of that,’ he tells Metro.co.uk.

‘In the morning, my flatmate just woke me up and said, you know, that the war has started.’

‘It was totally crazy. I actually slept through the first bombing because I was totally tired,’ he adds.

War is something Edward, like so many Ukrainians, knows too well. He lived in Dnipro in central Ukraine when Russia first seized Crimea nine years ago.

‘We saw everything with our own eyes,’ Edward says. ‘We saw the helicopters. I personally volunteered in a hospital with injured soldiers.

‘So when the full-scale invasion started, I would say I didn’t want to believe this because it was so, I don’t say unexpected, but it was so atrocious, it was so horrible, that they will start bombing us in the morning at 4/5am on February 24 last year, just started bombing Kyiv, the capital where I live.

‘Started bombing the whole country.’

‘The last year was the same for every Ukrainian because right now we are as a country fighting for our survival,’ adds Edward, who feels the war has become so routine he even knows not to bring his cat to the bomb shelter (he’s spooked by the sound).

‘I have friends on the front line. I think about them a lot. They are queer.’

In a bitter and bloody war that has dragged on for well over a year, regular Ukrainians have borne the brunt.

Across the country, homes have been flattened and infrastructure vital for keeping people alive has been destroyed. Lives upended – or ended altogether.

The sky of Dnipro where Edward once lived is now dusted by smoke and debris. People in Kyiv, meanwhile, have lost count of the number of missiles and drones that have rained upon them.

‘Bakhmut is the city where the main things are happening right now. Kyiv Pride had a programme in 2021, 2022 to work with the queer community in the east,’ Edward says.

‘I had to go to Bakmut in March 2022. But that is another city I’m never going to see.’

‘They are not thinking about civilians. They are not thinking about kids. They’re attacking schools, they’re attacking hospitals. Anything that exists in Ukraine,’ Edward says of Russia.

‘They want to wipe us out as a country.’

The true death toll in the war can be nearly impossible to count but the UN says that nearly 9,000 Ukrainian civilians have been killed.

Among them are LGBTQ+ Ukrainians, Edward is at pains to say.

The early days of the war were ‘crazy and scary’ as people hurried to queue in front of army sign-up sheets, volunteered to be frontline medics or raised money for supplies.

A surprisingly wily and resourceful Ukraine wasn’t going to go down easy, he adds, as soldiers hit back at Russia’s early attempts to seize Kyiv.

Yet no one in the country has been untouched by the grinding destruction and bloodshed.

Edward isn’t scared, though. ‘Just pissed off. Every step Russia does makes us more angry.’

Some queer Ukrainians see the Russia-Ukraine war as bringing a new urgency to advancing LGBTQ+ rights.

Ukraine has made huge progress in LGBTQ+ rights – yet things still remain patchy, according to Equaldex, which tracks queer rights and attitudes across the world. Trans people can freely change their legal gender, for example, but homophobia remains rife.

Asked if society should ‘accept homosexuality’, just under seven in 10 Ukrainians polled by the Pew Research Center in 2019 said no.

But last year, a survey by the NASH SVIT Center, a southeastern Ukraine LGBTQ+ group, found that around six in 10 Ukrainians agree that LGBTQ+ people should have equal rights.

Putin is partly to thank for this turbo-charged rise in support, Edward says. The president has long positioned LGBTQ+ rights as an almost existential threat to Russia; just another ‘corrupt Western value’.

‘We’ve worked a lot to explain that the war that is going on right now is not only, “Russia tries to destroy Ukraine”, it’s the war between Russia and the whole democratic world,’ Edward says.

‘If they destroy Ukraine, they will not stop. They will go further.’

Sofia Lapina, the president of UkrainePride, feels the same: ‘For Ukrainians, last year starts not from the new year, but from the invasion.’

As many Ukrainians did, Sofia lent her strength to military officials in the early months of the conflict. ‘You couldn’t pick or choose,’ she adds, when it came to helping the country.

‘A lot of my friends died,’ Sofia says flatly. ‘Some people are still fighting. Some volunteering. Life is totally surrounded by the war.’

To both Edward and Sofia, the Russia-Ukraine War is one of relentless horror where relief must be found in one another, tapping into the strength of the shared experience of survival.

One way this has been seen is how, Sofia says, the war has brought Ukraine’s lack of state recognition for same-sex relationships into focus as people placed their faith in Ukrainian soldiers – LGBTQ+ soldiers included.

Partners of LGBTQ+ fighters who are wounded – or worse, killed in battle – don’t have the same rights as their married, heterosexual peers under Ukrainian law.

Hospital visits, burials or collecting state welfare cheques are all impossible for queer couples.

But in the summer of 2022, an online petition for marriage equality gained 10s of thousands of signatures. It called for Article 51 of the Constitution of Ukraine, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman, to be chucked.

Volodymyr Zelensky said that as much as he supports marriage equality, his hands are tied – a legal kink means the constitution can’t be changed during wartime.

MP Inna Sovsun, a member of Ukraine’s liberal party Holos, submitted a bill calling for same-sex partnerships to be legally recognised in March.

‘Support for gay marriage is growing in Ukraine because people see the soldiers that protect us,’ says Edward, ‘they see people on the front line and they understand that they have the same rights that anybody has.

‘This thing was a very big change because of the war, which is sad definitely but on the other hand I really hope that we will have a civil partnership law.’

In December, Ukraine’s parliament, Verkhovna Rada, also passed a law outlawing anti-LGBTQ+ hate speech in the media.

Trans rights have also been megaphoned too during the war. As a trans person in Ukraine, Edward’s journey to legal recognition was a smooth one, he says, but challenges remain for the community.

‘We don’t have any transphobic laws in Ukraine like they do in the UK and many other countries,’ he says.

‘I personally didn’t change my documents,’ Edward adds, ‘but I have the diagnosis as a trans person and it took me two months as a whole to go through the psychiatric evaluation and receive a diagnosis.’

Edward’s plan to start hormonal therapy (HRT) and undergo gender-affirming surgery was derailed by the war, fearing that the medication could dry up.

Other trans Ukrainians have stopped taking the drugs out of fear of transphobic violence from the military, with activists saying that some have gone back into the closet as the gender marker on their passport doesn’t align with who they are.

‘It was unexpected, we really hope that this situation will make our community take care of themselves, love themselves and do everything which is needed to live their happy, normal lives,’ Edward says.

‘We will definitely continue to fight for [LGBTQ+] rights because we are still here, we are still queer. Nothing changes,’ he adds.

Edward is optimistic that change is inevitable. And after a year of the war – and the many years of conflict before that – queer folk in Ukraine are now just trying to get by.

‘Day-to-day life is us trying to live our best lives, having happy relationships, going to museums, cinemas, watching Ukrainian movies… and helping soldiers on every step of that,’ Edward says.

Kyiv Pride has, in recent weeks, sought to support those who have lost their homes or jobs because of the conflict. Teaching them skills such as painting nails or barista work to get them back on the payroll or throwing vogue balls and art fairs to raise money.

The theme of Pride this year for Kyiv Pride is a slight tweak to John Lennon’s 1971 track ‘Happy Xmas (War Is Over)’, now being the ‘war is not over’.

‘The war is definitely not over. Europe and the rest of the world is tired of our war and tired of Ukraine. I totally understand because it’s hard to feel those emotions when you are not inside them,’ Edward adds.

‘We will definitely push this narrative that the war is still there. We are still dying. Hello!

‘We will need help. We still need weapons. We will need for the world to ban Russia.’

With the gears of LGBTQ+ rights in Ukraine set to top speed, Sofia says that international support from the West is playing a big part in this.

Even as it gutted its economies and ratcheted up tensions, most Western countries have remained steadfast in their support for Ukraine.

Sofia saw this as she desperately leapfrogged around the world after the war, moving around some eight countries. ‘There’s a big difference between moving because you have to and travelling,’ she says.

She eventually made the ‘spontaneous’ decision to move to London last year, which has been her ‘dream’ since she was a child.

‘When I moved here, everything was so easy here and we are pretty much safe. I started to feel here at home almost immediately,’ she says.

‘I got a lot of support from other European countries I visited before as a person affected by the war, but only here in the UK, in London, I started to feel like I am finally home.’

As part of her campaign work, Sofia has worked together with various British Pride groups as well as an art exhibition in Liverpool that told through photographs the lives of war-torn queer Ukrainians. (Pride in London, among Britain’s biggest Pride events, is next on her calendar.)

The Eurovision Song Contest in Liverpool, however, was especially touching.

‘The fact that Ukraine, with the support of the British people, could still hold Eurovision under the Ukrainian context was about life and about that no one can kill the idea of free people,’ Sofia says.

‘It wasn’t about whether we would win, it was that against all the odds, the doom and gloom, the Ukrainian voice was still heard.

‘Yes, you can fight and shoot and kill people physically, but you can’t kill the idea of freedom. Russia will never be a winner. They’re just killers.’

The sense of fear that marked the early days of Russia’s war against Ukraine has, for Edward, faded. Cautious optimism is now the norm.

Zelensky told world leaders last June he hoped to end the war before 2023. Now, as Ukraine’s long-anticipated counteroffensive rumbles, there doesn’t seem to be a clear-cut way for the bloodshed to end.

‘I definitely cannot say or imagine when we will win, but I know that we will,’ Edward sats.

‘We will definitely rebuild Ukraine. There is a lot to rebuild. There is a lot to mourn.’

‘We are very strong here,’ Edward adds, ‘and we will not give up.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.

For more stories like this, check our news page.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.