The fourth anniversary of Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of Ukraine has now arrived. Just a few days ago, Russian forces launched a major combined missile and drone attack against Ukraine, predominantly targeting the region surrounding the capital city of Kyiv. Close to fifty missiles and 300 drones battered the nation’s energy sector, damaging residential buildings and railways, killing a man, and leaving more than a dozen people wounded in Kyiv alone.
Power outages are now the norm in the city, where temperatures have reached as low as 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Sidewalks and roads are covered in heavy snow alongside black ice, making travel by car or foot treacherous. As positive developments fail to materialize at the trilateral talks in Geneva between Russia, Ukraine, and the United States, Ukrainians continue to live their daily lives in seemingly impossible conditions.
Members of Kyiv’s queer community are working to keep creativity alive as their city undergoes seismic changes. Queer nightlife and connection are still possible across the capital, even with midnight curfews now turning nights out into evenings out, typically starting at about 5 p.m. and ending by 11 p.m. at the latest. Nightclubs like K41 and Closer are well known for being queer-friendly and offering a truly safe space for Kyiv’s LGBT community to meet.
“It keeps changing every year, it gets more difficult. A lot of people have left, and it’s heartbreaking to think that some of them are not planning to come back, and our community we used to have will not be back again,” says Angelik Ustymenko, a queer artist and activist.
Before the invasion Ustymenko and their collective Rebel Queers used street graffiti to communicate with each other. “For queer people who live in the city and who also feel lonely in a way, writing something on the wall kind of tells them, ‘Hey, you’re not alone,’” they add. The community quickly unified around the idea, and more and more LGBT people, across several cities in Ukraine, began sharing their own graffiti with Rebel Queers.
The arrival of war immediately changed the trajectory of Ustymenko’s artistic career. Ustymenko’s documentary Rebel Queers: Ukraine’s Queer Resistance, released in 2023, followed the lives of young LGBT Ukrainian soldiers fighting to defend their country.
“At the same time, a lot of people joined the army. A lot of people are being killed. This loss is on so many levels, it’s present and it’s felt. The queer community now in Kyiv has a big wound that is bleeding, and this loss just keeps happening and happening,” they say.
There is no question Ukraine is deeply divided on LGBT issues, including marriage equality. But the presence of LGBT military service members and the association of far-right, anti-LGBT ideologies with Russia have tempered some of the most extreme elements of vitriol against the community.
An October 2025 survey by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology found that 18 percent of Ukrainian respondents had a positive feeling about LGBT people, with 45 percent feeling neutral and 33 percent negative. Yet the percentage of people saying that LGBT people in Ukraine should have the same rights as other citizens has grown from 63 percent in 2022 to 78 percent in 2025
Several relatively high-profile cases of anti-LGBT protests and attacks have been reported in recent months. Ukrainian singer Mélovin, who won a season of X-Factor Ukraine and subsequently represented Ukraine at the Eurovision Song Contest 2018, came out as bisexual in 2021 via an Instagram post. Just last week, on February 17th in the Western Ukrainian city of Rivne, a group of protesters, some masked, disrupted Mélovin’s concert, shouting anti-marriage equality slogans, including “Heroes are not fighting for gay marriages,” resulting in the performance being canceled.
While reporting from a recent Ukrainian Fashion Week, held in Kyiv, I asked an attendee in an eye-catching and elaborate outfit if he would feel comfortable wearing it out in the streets of the city. He said that, based on his past experience, doing so would cause negative attention, with people likely to shout abuse at him or worse.
For Andrii Kravchuk, a Ukrainian LGBT activist and one of the founders of the Nash Mir (Our World) Gay and Lesbian Centre, Ukraine’s leading LGBT advocacy center, the turn toward even deeper integration with Europe and the West has changed everything about the approach to LGBT rights in the country.
“These issues that were rather theoretical before became practical, as Ukraine must comply with the European human rights standards in this sphere. Our most important enemies of the Ukrainian LGBTQ movement, they currently just can’t afford to openly support Russian discourse on LGBTQ issues,” he says.
As the Ukrainian government takes broad legislative and political steps to shorten the nation’s path into the European Union, Kravchuk has found in his advocacy work that being a candidate to join the EU is a powerful tool for advocacy.
“Currently, the politically situation is becoming much more favorable for the LGBTQ community. But, of course, we [are]Ukrainians and going through everything that all other Ukrainians are going through,” explains Kravchuk, mentioning the ongoing threats posed by Russia’s war.
When U.S. President Donald Trump took office, according to Kravchuk, far-right movements in Ukraine were initially boosted by the expected ideological pressure the administration would place on Kyiv. But these ultra-conservative groups were soon disappointed, as pushing back against LGBT policies in Ukraine has not been part of U.S. foreign policy.
Reflecting on what four years of war means is hard for Ustymenko, who believes that after the Russian aggression against Ukraine ends, there will need to be a long period of recovering and healing.
“This wound that we have, it will take generations to heal. I’ve kind of accepted the fact that me and my generation are, in a way, a lost generation because we’ve been so traumatized,” says Ustymenko. “For the future, we need to have the opportunity to heal, care for each other and, as part of this healing process, keep fighting for our rights.”
Finbarr Toesland is a multi-award-winning journalist committed to illuminating vital human rights stories and underreported issues. He has reported on war crime allegations in Ukraine, travelled to Berlin’s first LGBT refugee center, and investigated Europe’s invitation-only conversion therapy conference as part of a cross-border collaborative project.
