Russian authorities have been rounding up gay men and coercing them to fight in Ukraine, according to some recent reports.
The Russian leader has long vilified the gay community in Russia and introduced a raft of new anti-LGBTQ+ laws while promoting supposedly “traditional” masculinity as part of his narrative of creating support for the war. He regularly uses conservative values and the idea of a “traditional” family as part of his anti-west – and anti-Ukraine – rhetoric.
In 2022, when Putin first announced his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he described it as a defence against the west’s “destruction of our traditional values”. A year later, the Russian parliament outlawed what it calls the “global LGBT movement” as “extremism”.
