Since the start of the war, Russian soldiers have targeted vulnerable Ukrainian women for sexual abuse.
These are just a few of their stories.
Olena Zaitseva was in the early stages of pregnancy when she was unlawfully detained by Russian forces in February 2019.
“They took me into a prison-like facility, where they handcuffed me and attached me to a pipe,” she recalls. But soon after, they moved her to another room, “where the violence—and all the horrors imaginable—took place.”
Living close to what was then the front lines of eastern Ukraine, where the ongoing war with Russia first broke out in 2014, Olena and her 18-year old son Vladyslav had been accused by Russian forces of plotting to destroy railway infrastructure. Without legal defense or recourse, the mother, then 48, would spend the next four years as a civilian captive, while her son would be sentenced to 22 years in prison.
Olena was first held captive in Makiyivka, a former prison colony, and later in Izolyatsia, a former pre-trial detention center. Both had been converted into torture chambers by the Russian army, and were widely known for the atrocities committed by Russian servicemen against Ukrainian prisoners—atrocities that continue to this day.
When she first arrived at Makiyivka, Olena tells me she was imprisoned in a one-person cell, where around six men in balaclavas beat her and raped her with rubber batons for several days. (The soldiers put a bag on her head, so she could not count the total number of perpetrators.) The rapes triggered grave gynecological difficulties, causing Olena to bleed heavily. For nearly two years, these symptoms persisted. “I was alone in a cell with only a mattress, a bottle of water, and one bucket,” she says. “I’d sit on the bucket so that the blood could flow because I had no pads, no cloth, nothing.”
Olena with a photo of her son, Vladyslav. (Photo: Sara Cincurova)
Subjected to other forms of torture, Olena did not receive medical aid in her four years in Russian captivity, except for a single hospital visit in occupied Donetsk to consult with a gynecologist. “I cannot translate that feeling into words,” she recalls. “It was like in American movies: my hands in chains, my legs in irons, I was forced to bend forward and look down, and they dragged me like a dog. I was so ashamed.”
“People were walking in the street, and I had a bag on my head, like the worst of the criminals,” she says.
The doctors did not give her a diagnosis that day. It would have been impossible, Olena says, because the same Russian servicemen and prison guards who had abused her were watching and listening. But she already knew she had lost her pregnancy as a result of the violence she’d experienced during her imprisonment. (The father of her child would die on the front lines before they could be reunited.)
After four years in captivity, Olena was freed in a prisoner exchange in 2022. I meet her outside of Kyiv, where she now lives alone in a small room in a shared apartment. She has recently applied to receive disability status as a result of permanent injuries sustained during her imprisonment, while her son Vladyslav remains in Russian captivity, now for the eighth consecutive year. Olena continues to advocate for his release every day, and says she only relives the abuse she experienced and gives interviews to the press in order to help draw attention to his case. But she admits there is little hope.
“For my son to be exchanged, a miracle would have to happen,” she tells me. “Looking at what is happening, those who had been imprisoned before 2022 have been forgotten.”
Searching Houses for Vulnerable Victims
Olena’s story is just one of nearly 30 testimonies I have collected over the past two years of conflict-related sexual violence perpetrated against Ukrainian women, and is consistent with the testimonies of other women I have interviewed who were held at Makiyivka and Izolyatsia.
All of the women’s accounts were independently verified by Ukrainian NGOs collecting evidence of Russia’s war crimes, and together, paint a grim picture of systematic abuse—one that is not just a crime of opportunity, but suggests an intentional scouting effort by Russian soldiers to find potential victims who are especially vulnerable.
Although the Geneva Conventions, as well as international humanitarian law, stipulate that all civilians in conflict who are wounded or sick “shall be respected and protected in all circumstances,” UN reporting suggests that Russian forces have not respected these protections, routinely abusing even the most defenseless of Ukrainian civilians. Children, disabled persons, and the elderly are also protected civilians under international law; as are pregnant women like Olena, as well as mothers and other caregivers. But since the war broke out in 2014, rape and other war crimes have been routinely documented against each of these protected groups, as confirmed by both a 2023 and 2024 UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine. Explicitly defining rape as a form of torture under international law, the investigators found that soldiers routinely "identified women in a vulnerable situation" and "committed acts of rape and sexual violence when they broke into the victims’ houses," sometimes "at gunpoint with extreme brutality and with acts of torture, such as beatings and strangling."
(Photo: Diana Deliurman)
While sexual violence has become a defining weapon in the Russian war in Ukraine, it has also been on the rise in conflicts around the world. A 2025 UN report documented thousands more cases of conflict-related sexual violence in 2024 compared with the year before—a 25 percent increase, widely considered a conservative estimate. A 2026 report of the UN Secretary-General on conflict-related sexual violence estimated that for each rape reported in connection with a global conflict, 10 to 20 cases went undocumented.
Rape and other forms of sexual violence have long been a violation of international humanitarian law, yet committed with impunity in conflicts around the world, Jessica Neuwirth, founder of the Frontline Women's Fund, tells The Conversationalist. Her organization works to combat this by offering support to women's organizations working in conflict zones, helping survivors of sexual violence. “The Geneva Conventions prohibit ‘outrages upon personal dignity’ and specifically mention ‘rape and any form of indecent assault,’" she says. “The statute of the International Criminal Court explicitly includes rape as both a war crime and a crime against humanity.”
The problem, Neuwirth says, has not been the legal prohibition of rape, but the failure to hold perpetrators accountable under the law.
There have, however, been some efforts to bring perpetrators to account. In 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Alice Jill Edwards, joined by several other experts, sent a dossier of sexual torture allegations to the Russian Federation, involving the cases of 10 Ukrainian civilians. “These were all highly sexualized assaults which included rapes, threats of rape, and other depraved conduct,” the dossier read. “It is becoming clearer that the Russian Federation’s deliberate and systematic policy of torture in Ukraine involves sexualized torture and other sexualized cruelty, including against the civilian population.” (While Russia did not formally address a reply to the UN, the Kremlin has publicly stated its belief that many reports by Ukrainian women of sexual violence were groundless.)
The Strongest of All
“No one is as strong as Ukrainian women,” Liudmyla, a retired teacher who will celebrate her 79th birthday this summer, tells me. In the summer of 2022, she was beaten and raped by a young Russian serviceman in her house in a small village of the Kherson region, then under Russian occupation. The soldier left her with four broken ribs, among other injuries.
I interviewed Liudmyla for the first time in February 2025. Despite temperatures in the negatives that day, we set out to meet in the ruins of a bombarded elementary school in her village, which Liudmyla wanted to show me. In the end, we had no choice but to record the interview in a car because of the unbearable cold.
Despite the risks of coming forward with her story, Liudmyla has refused to be silenced, and has inspired other survivors in the country to speak out—including elderly or deeply religious women who at times blamed themselves for their assault. For her bravery, she is now seen as a local leader.
Liudmyla. (Photo: Diana Deliurman)
A year and a half after our first interview, I meet Liudmyla again. Her mobility has worsened; she struggles to walk up and down the stairs. But her resolve remains unchanged, speaking with the same determination she had the first time we met.
The day she was raped, Liudmyla recalls, she was convinced she would die. When the soldier started violating her, she said “farewell to my children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren in my mind.” But she survived. “I speak in order to denounce the war crimes committed by Russia against Ukrainian women,” she tells me.
Liudmyla says the Russian soldier who raped her stormed into her house around 10 p.m. She was terrified: At the time, she lived alone. He shouted and interrogated her, asking questions such as “who lives in your house?” and “why are the lights turned on?” Then, he beat her up and tore her clothes apart. He raped her, she says, then immediately fell asleep beside her. Liudmyla said those hours were among the most harrowing. “I lay right next to him, petrified,” she said, “while he was asleep and snoring.”
At 4 a.m., the soldier woke up and told Liudmyla he would come back in two days. “He told me that if I told anyone, he would kill me,” she says. Liudmyla was too scared to go to the hospital—then occupied by Russian troops—and immediately decided to flee her village rather than wait for the soldier’s return. She was only able to move back to her house, which had been almost completely destroyed, after her village was liberated in late 2022.
Recalling the days of occupation, Liudmyla says she saw wounded and desperate civilians being tortured by Russian soldiers. Some were hanged; others were forced to drink motor oil, she recalls. Other survivors as well as Ukrainian soldiers from the area I have interviewed recall seeing and hearing school children being raped.
Today, Liudmyla’s village is located near the so-called “kill zone,” about 30 kilometers from the frontlines, where Russian servicemen use first-person view (FPV) drones to kill civilians with precision. The practice is called “human safari”—an act of brutality consisting of dropping bombs on people, cars, and even children at play, as if it is a video game. Making matters more dire for the village, there is almost no access to food or medications. “If it wasn’t for humanitarian organizations, I would die of hunger today,” Liudmyla tells me. She hopes the situation will not get worse.
Liudmyla’s testimony is not an isolated incident. Rape and forced abductions of elderly Ukrainian civilians by the Russian army have been widely documented in recent years. The elderly also represent a large majority of people who remain living close to the frontlines, unable or unwilling to move out of the houses where they have spent their entire lives.
Pain That Cannot Be Expressed in Words
While international humanitarian law protects all civilians living in conflict without discrimination, certain groups are singled out for additional protections. The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, for example, contains specific protections for people with disabilities, who are at greater risk of violence, including of a sexual nature.
While reports across various countries have shown that violence against people with disabilities tends to receive relatively little media coverage, the UN has been “gravely concerned” about the fate of disabled Ukrainians since the outset of the war. “People with disabilities trapped in the Russian control zones in Ukraine are reportedly being used as ‘human shields’ by the Russian Federation armed forces,” the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) warned in September 2022. Other human rights organizations such as ZMINA have also published reports documenting the experiences of women with disabilities living in Ukraine.
Lidia Tarash, the acting head of the Department of Documenting War Crimes at the Ukrainian NGO Media Initiative for Human Rights, tells me that according to their organization’s data, at least 27 civilians with disabilities are currently held in Russian captivity. “We also have testimonies regarding at least five seriously ill civilians unlawfully detained by Russia,” she says. “These include people with spinal conditions, epilepsy, diabetes, asthma, cancer, amputations, and paralysis.” Some of these civilians are also being held “incommunicado,” in complete isolation from the outside world—their whereabouts and conditions completely unknown.
“These cases demonstrate that even particularly vulnerable groups of civilians receive no protection from Russia’s system of persecution,” she explains. “They point to the systematic nature of the unlawful detention of Ukrainian civilians and Russia’s blatant disregard for international humanitarian law."
Documenting disabled people’s stories in conflict also presents particular challenges. Many disabled people live close to the frontlines, where media access is limited and particularly dangerous. Disabled people are also a largely underrepresented group across traditional media, and anecdotally, this has made it especially difficult for journalists to find a home for their stories. On his last day in the role, Giles Duley, the United Nations Global Advocate for Persons with Disabilities in Conflict and Peacebuilding Situations, said, “When I photograph somebody in a war zone… they always say to me: share this story with the leaders. But the opportunities to do so were never fully realized.”
(Photo: Diana Deliurman)
In the spring of 2025, I spoke with the mother of a disabled woman, living with her family only about 13 kilometers from the frontlines of the Kherson region. Their village, which was occupied in 2022, has been routinely hit and targeted by FPV drones.
Her daughter Olha, she explains, sustained a severe head injury as a toddler that blocked the flow of oxygen to her brain, leaving her non-verbal and bed-bound. Although now a young woman of 33, she still looks like a child, no older than 9 or 10.
In late February 2022, as Russians stormed into their region, Olha’s parents were taken to the local police station for questioning. Her mother says they were forced to kneel for hours as they were beaten and interrogated by Russian soldiers. But all the while, she feared most for her daughter, who had been left at home alone.
Hours later, Olha’s mother was released. When she returned home, she found Olha lying on the bed, naked and motionless, with sweets placed on her pillow.
“Olha cannot undress herself alone,” her mother tells me. Devastated, she immediately knew: It must have been the Russian soldiers.
With Olha unable to speak, it was impossible to fully determine what had happened. But Olha’s body spoke for her. In the months that followed, she lost around 10 kilograms, and nearly all her teeth fell out. She became terrified of men, her mother says.
While the family will never know the details of the abuse, organizations such as Human Rights Watch have documented similar war crimes perpetrated against people with disabilities in Ukraine. In 2024, the country’s United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) stated that the prolonged and combined nature of insecurity, displacement, and economic deterioration had reduced “the coping capacities of women and girls and other at-risk groups in Ukraine ... further exposing them to risks of gender-based violence.” The organization also warned that older women and women with disabilities represent a significant majority of vulnerable civilians in frontline areas, and that both are more likely to be left alone, which often makes them especially vulnerable. As a result, the UNFPA concluded that different forms of gender-based violence have been significantly increasing.
A Fear of Sexual Violence
Children are legally protected in armed conflicts under international humanitarian law, with a series of rules granting them special protections. Ukraine’s General Prosecutor’s Office is currently investigating 23 cases of child victims of conflict-related sexual abuse, out of a total 396 reported cases of sexual violence by Russian troops. These numbers, however, are likely just the tip of the iceberg, and do not reflect the full reality of the sexual abuse that has been committed against children.
Alla Sobchuk, a 42-year old woman from Kherson, tells me she was unlawfully detained with her then 11-year old daughter, Viktoriia, when the city was occupied in 2022. She says they were driving through a checkpoint set up by the Russian military, who tried to force her to remove her window tint.
“I said no and they threatened to shoot me,” she says. “They handcuffed me, beat me, put zip ties on my wrists, and sprayed me with tear gas.” All of this, she adds, happened in front of her daughter.
Alla next to a sign that reads, "Ukraine will win." (Photo courtesy of Alla Sobchuk.)
The pair was then taken to a former police station, occupied by what seemed to be Russian police, she says. Viktoriia watched as Russian officers hit her mother and tore her dress apart.
“We are both very afraid of sexual violence,” Alla says, “and very afraid they would assault us.” (She adds that “luckily,” the Russian forces “only” used physical violence.)
Viktoriia was taken to a separate office, where the soldiers interrogated her. One of them threatened to send her to a boarding school and Alla to prison, before threatening Alla directly, as well. “He hit me in the face because I demanded my child be returned,” Alla says. They were both held at the police station in separate offices for nearly 24 hours. The next day, they were freed.
After they were released, Alla says, Viktoriia was very frightened—but relieved to see her mother again. “I supported her by telling her she was a hero, and even adults could not endure the [abuse] by occupation forces the way she did.”
Viktoriia next to a sign that reads "Kherson is Ukraine!!!" (Photo courtesy of Alla Sobchuk.)
This kind of exposure to violence—sexual and otherwise—is prevalent in captivity, especially in cases where children and teenagers are held for longer periods of time. But as more cases emerge involving Ukrainian children, particularly those detained in Russia, humanitarian organizations—and victims’ families—are warning of another deeply disturbing reality: evidence of severe physical and sexual violence inflicted on children themselves. Mariam Lambert, the co-founder of Emile Foundation, an organization that helps bring Ukrainian children abducted to Russia back to Ukraine, shared one recent case involving a family reunited after years of separation. “One of the children, a six-year-old girl, had previously been identified on a Russian adoption database,” Lambert says. “After her return home, evidence emerged indicating that she had been exposed to violent sexual abuse while in Russian-controlled custody.”
Lambert also confirms that similar incidents point to a broader pattern of abuse, disappearance, forced separation, and exploitation of vulnerable children caught inside a system operating without transparency or accountability. “The world still does not fully understand what some of these children have endured,” she concludes.
Hundreds of Methods of Torture
The sexual abuse committed as a weapon of war by the Russian forces remains just one method of brutal torture used against imprisoned civilians and other prisoners of war. Lyubov Smachylo, the Head of the Analytical Department at Media Initiative for Human Rights Ukraine, an NGO that has carried out comprehensive investigations and in-depth interviews with detained civilians, says she and her colleagues have been able to document patterns and connections between violations of civilians’ rights in different locations and at different times, which indicates that such violations “are not isolated incidents and may qualify as war crimes, as well as crimes against humanity.” Today, the organization is aware of at least 2,495 civilians held in unlawful captivity across 240 locations.
Based on in-depth interviews conducted as part of the organization’s research, in 87% cases of torture, Russian forces subjected victims to severe beatings, using their hands, feet, sticks, clubs, belts, hammers, or other improvised equipment. Of the 54 torture victims identified, 34 were also subjected to electric shocks. The evidence also suggests that Russian forces have used sexual and gender-based violence against both male and female detainees.
On May 22, 2026, the Ukrainian Parliament Commissioner for Human Rights, Dmytro Lubinets, reported that Russia has used 695 different forms of torture, including physical and psychological abuse, as well as sexual violence, in the war so far." Prisoners of war are strangled, beaten, subjected to electric shocks, set upon by dogs and sometimes forced to stand in one place for up to 18 hours; as soon as you start to squat, you are immediately physically beaten,” he said. He said that Russia has already tortured 406 Ukrainian captives to death.
This torture and abuse is perpetrated unlawfully and indiscriminately. The stories described above are a reminder that such horrors have not spared anyone—not even the elderly, not even the children. But reporting for months on sexual abuse across Ukraine, it has become clear to me that numerous survivors do not want their accounts to remain buried in shame. Nearly all of the women I spoke to longed to have their stories told and shared with the world—showing global readers that such unbearable, widespread abuse continues, and none of its perpetrators have been brought to justice for their crimes.
[post_title] => "All the Horrors Imaginable"
[post_excerpt] => Since the start of the war, Russian soldiers have targeted vulnerable Ukrainian women for sexual abuse. These are just a few of their stories.
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Why the Duma's new restrictions against LGBTQ "propaganda" are both dangerous and unsurprising.
Nearly everyone who pursues an advanced degree in area studies without having ethnic or family ties to their chosen region has an unusual story about how they got into the field. In my case, the interest stemmed from two short-term evangelical youth mission trips to Russia in 1999 and 2000.
I had just graduated from high school at the time, and I was looking for something to help me contextualize a crisis of faith that had been troubling me for several years. I wanted to imagine a world beyond the stifling Midwestern conservative Christian enclave in which I’d grown up, and when I first stepped off the plane in Moscow, I was nervous but also thrilled to start getting a sense of what Russia was like. I was thus susceptible to certain romantic notions about the “Russian soul” and its depth of authenticity that supposedly contrasted with Western superficiality and calculation, and, after seeing the sights in Moscow and spending a couple of weeks getting to know young Russians in a rural summer camp environment, I was hooked. In that lingering post-Cold War moment of relative optimism, I developed a naive fascination with Russian language and culture that came to define my professional and intellectual life in the following years.
It’s embarrassing to me now that I ever engaged in missionary activities, but, while I quickly gave up on the desirability of converting (Orthodox) Christians to (Protestant) Christianity, the new friends and pen pals and an interest in the country itself remained. I began to study Russian in college, and from that point on, I traveled to Russia regularly until the end of 2015, by which time I had earned a PhD in modern Russian history from Stanford University and spent three years teaching at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (RANEPA), a school with which Stanford partnered at the time. But these days, I’m forced to wonder if I’ll ever go back.
Amid the coverage of Russia’s brutal war in Ukraine, which has dragged on now for nearly eight months, the Russian State Duma has been preparing to pass further restrictions against LGBTQ “propaganda” in an initiative that Deputy Alexander Khinshtein, chair of the committee on information policy, believes may pass as early as next week, according to reporting by the Russian news service Interfax. The new legislation, for which hefty fines will be demanded from violators, is quite comprehensive, banning any public representation of queer sexualities or gender identities, and making particular mention of banning “information that might cause children to wish to change their sex.” Thus far, this new legislation has received relatively little comment in the Western press. But there is no doubt that the legislation and the Russian discourse around it will generate yet more violence against a scapegoated minority as the government drives LGBTQ existence entirely underground.
“Sodomy” was illegal in the Soviet Union, and was only legalized in Russia in 1993. At that point, many observers believed that a democratizing post-Soviet state was on a trajectory toward greater acceptance of difference and greater integration into the international community. Sadly, and in retrospect unsurprisingly, the openness did not last.
From 2003 to 2004, in between finishing college at Ball State University and starting my postgraduate studies at Stanford, I worked as an English teacher at the American Home—a private English school and center of cultural exchange—in the provincial Russian city of Vladimir, in the region I’d traveled to as a youth missionary. In my advanced English classes at the American Home, I had students read and discuss newspaper articles about current events, and that year, the state of Massachusetts had legalized same-sex marriage. When we discussed the topic in class, by and large, the students voiced negative opinions. But whether it was acceptable that we were discussing homosexuality and LGBTQ rights in the classroom was never remotely in question.
Fast-forward to the 2012-2013 academic year, when, post-PhD, I taught humanities classes to both undergraduates and master’s students at RANEPA. One of the Russian students in my postgraduate course—the only liberal among the Russians in the class—gave a sympathetic presentation about Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” protest and its aftermath. She chose the topic entirely on her own, but I was admittedly enthusiastic. Her presentation gave way to a chaotic shouting match among the students, which I should have taken as a foreshadowing of things to come. Some weeks later, I got a frantic phone call from a RANEPA administrator demanding to know why I had “taught Pussy Riot lyrics” in my class. The conversation left me wondering if I was going to get fired. While I didn’t, I did learn to self-censor a bit in the classroom. Later that summer, the Russian State Duma passed its notorious anti-gay “propaganda” law banning the dissemination of any information about “non-traditional sexual relations” to minors. I was dismayed.
All of this has been on my mind in light of the Duma’s new anti-LGBTQ legislation—legislation that feels all the more potent given what is fueling it. Because while anti-queer sentiment has been brewing for years, with much encouragement from above, it is also quite clear that Moscow’s anti-queer obsession is connected with the war in Ukraine, both of which derive from an authoritarian ethos that elevates toxic masculinity, patriarchy, and “traditional values” as an ideal to be emulated, promising punishment for those who deviate. The legislation is of a piece with the war effort, which Russian Orthodox Church and state officials have cast in terms of “spiritual warfare” against the “satanic” West, specifically for its rejection of these same “traditional values.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken an increasingly right-wing populist line since 2011, a period when protests against corruption and election irregularities were a regular feature of life in Moscow. Meanwhile, since the Ukrainian protests of 2013, which centered on Kyiv’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) and developed into what is now referred to as the Revolution of Dignity, right-wing Russian politicians and Russian Orthodox Christian leaders have fixated on Ukrainian aspirations for democracy and self-determination, denouncing these hopes as a Western conspiracy, Nazism, Satanism—and, of course, as the corrupting influence of “Gayropa.” The authoritarian desire of the Putin regime and Russian nationalists to control the future of Kyiv has thus been framed in terms of “Western decadence” vs. “traditional Slavic values,” a framing that, until Putin actually invaded Ukraine, generated a great deal of sympathy for the Russian autocrat on the American and European Right.
Here at home, of course, LGBTQ rights are also under intense attack by the Right, and certain states’ governors—those of Florida and Texas in particular—have so severely abused their respective state bureaucracies in their efforts to persecute transgender Americans and their supporters that many families with trans children have been forced to move out of state. This isn’t the post-Cold War world many of us once young, naïve idealists imagined. When I returned from Russia to take a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of South Florida in Tampa in 2015, I still thought I was going to a place where things were getting better and better for queer folks like myself. I was wrong.
In both Putin’s authoritarian Russia and Trump’s authoritarian America, it was (and has been) painful to watch people I thought were reasonable go all-in for the nationalist narratives that leave no room for those who are different from the straight Christian norm. Ironically, it was while living in Moscow, at age 33, that I finally came to recognize my own queerness, the source of feeling “different” and uncomfortable in my own skin that had marked my evangelical childhood and youth, and which that same evangelical socialization had left me ill-equipped to see or acknowledge. Once upon a time, I had held up Russia as a mirror to America, my vague young adult discontent and inability to feel comfortable in my Christian Right milieu fueling a need to broaden my horizons about human possibilities. Now, I see in both countries a sort of imperial provincialism, a post-Cold War hangover borne of “great power” nostalgia and a yawning abyss of insecurity papered over with jingoistic bravado, conspiracy theories, and approved categories of people to hate, while (in classic abuser mode) claiming to “love” them so much that you have to beat them into conformity with what is ultimately “best for them.” In both countries, there are many good people who resist these toxic impulses, but the impulses persist, leaving destruction in their wake.
The last time I was in Russia was December 2015, when RANEPA flew me to Moscow to sign a contract that supposedly had to be signed in person before I could get paid for the last semester of editorial work I had done remotely on one of the school’s academic journals. With not much to do other than wait for the paperwork, I visited friends, strolled down memory lane, and went ice skating with a colleague and an ex-girlfriend at the massive outdoor rink in Gorky Park. Amid New Year’s preparations, almost no work gets done in Russia in late December, and on the day I had to leave Moscow, there was still no contract for me to sign. “Don’t worry,” a young administrator told me. “We’ll just forge your signature on the contract.” I finally got paid in cash at an academic conference in the United States that took place nearly a year later.
That surreal goodbye to Russia is an apt coda to the years I spent at RANEPA, when Putin’s creeping authoritarianism started to become, well, much less creeping. In the first few years after 2015, I continued to assume I would return to Russia someday. But now, many Russians themselves, including some of my friends and colleagues, have had to flee the country for their own protection as conscientious objectors to the full-scale war that, back then, none of us anticipated. Some LGBTQ Russians have also fled in recent years, a trend that will no doubt continue as state persecution of the LGBTQ community intensifies. Just as Americans sometimes debate whether it’s ethical for people whose rights and safety are threatened to leave red states instead of staying and trying to change things for the better, the topic of leaving or remaining in Russia—which inevitably raises questions of privilege and survivors’ guilt—has been a contentious matter among the Russian intelligentsia in recent years. My own thinking is that no one who can find a way to leave—especially no marginalized person—is ever ethically obligated to remain in a place that denies them their rights and is unsafe for them. Sometimes, as you struggle to keep hope alive that someday things will be better, all you can do is bear witness.
[post_title] => Russia's New Anti-LGBTQ Legislation is Just More of the Same Authoritarianism
[post_excerpt] => Why the Duma's new restrictions against LGBTQ "propaganda" are both dangerous and unsurprising.
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