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As the full-scale invasion of Ukraine enters its fifth year, Hadley Stewart speaks to the photographer and journalist who has been capturing the stories of LGBTQ+ people living in the war-torn country.
Olena Hloba saw the first Russian tanks rolling into the city of Bucha, located about 30 kilometres northwest of Kyiv, from her son’s top floor apartment late one evening. It was just days after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.
A decade before that frightful evening, she had founded an organisation for the parents of LGBTQ+ children, motivated by her own fears for her child’s safety in Ukraine. A prominent gay activist, Hloba’s son had fled the country prior to its invasion and sought refuge in the United States, having been subjected to a torrent of threats against his life.
Having hidden for days in the basement of her building, she rode a bicycle through snow to escape the Russian-occupied city. She then learned of the massacre that would later be described by the Human Rights Watch as a “litany of apparent war crimes” committed by Russian forces during their occupation of Bucha. Mass murders, enforced disappearances and torture have now become synonymous with Hloba’s hometown.
Once Russian troops withdrew from Bucha, Hloba returned and continued her work to support the local LGBTQ+ community against the backdrop of war. Hers is one of many stories and portraits featured in The Queer Face of War, the first in-depth visual and oral history of an LGBTQ+ community in war, by award-winning photographer and journalist J. Lester Feder.
Olena Hloba photographed in her apartment. (J. Lester Feder)Feder arrived in war-torn Ukraine as part of his work with the global LGBTQ+ organisation Outright International, where he was a senior fellow between 2021 and 2023. “I wasn’t there to be a photographer,” says Feder over video call from his home in New York. He was in the country to interview people for a human rights report. Once the interviews were finished, he asked people if he could take their photos. “I expected people would say no, as they had said no to me in so many other contexts. So when people started saying yes, I was floored.”
Having worked as a journalist in over 40 countries, Feder is well-versed when it comes to telling the stories of LGBTQ+ people from across the world. In fact, his first assignment as BuzzFeed News’s first international correspondent for global LGBTQ+ news was a trip to Kyiv. It was 2013 and the former Soviet Union country was in a period of transition. “There were literally billboards up that said association with the EU equals same sex marriage,” recalls Feder of his visit to the Ukrainian capital. A homophobic campaign that Feder tells me was funded by a Russian oligarch with links to president Vladimir Putin.
It was a prime example of the Russian leader’s use of homophobia as a political weapon, explains Feder. Having passed so-called gay propaganda laws in 2013, framing these laws as a way of protecting Russian traditional values and simultaneously stoking up support for Putin from the Russian people, the Kremlin employed a similar homophobic rhetoric in neighbouring Ukraine. The aim of the campaign was to sway the public’s opinion away from Ukraine’s stronger ties with the European Union and the West.
“We saw countries like Russia attacking LGBT rights as a way of also attacking the very idea of human rights, the very idea of democratic values, or any kind of universal norms that people of all kinds have rights in a society,” says Feder. “When the full-scale invasion started, that was again very much on the surface. The night Putin announced the invasion, he said it was necessary because the West was trying to destroy Russia by attacking its traditional values.”
Alongside this escalating tension from Russia during Feder’s time at BuzzFeed, he also reported on stories about queer people living through conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. He was never able to use their photos, or sometimes even their real names. The LGBTQ+ people who spoke to him in these countries were all too aware of the dangers they would be putting themselves in if they were to speak openly.
What are the unique challenges facing queer and trans people living in conflict zones, I ask him. “Homophobia is very active in all spaces, but especially most of the places that we’ve seen war in the past 100 years,” replies Feder, pointing out the “power of stigma” and a wider exploitation of homophobia to win the support of civilian populations from certain military forces, governments and regimes. “We saw in Syria and Iraq, ISIS executing people accused of homosexuality, as a way of saying that they were protecting their community’s values. There are also documented cases of that in the Colombian civil war and in Afghanistan.”
He adds, “Generally, where people are already being targeted for violence in peaceful places, when law and order breaks down, it’s just even more likely to happen.”
During the course of his reporting, Feder also noticed a recurring theme: LGBTQ+ people in countries where they are persecuted are often unable to ask for support from their neighbours. It was something that struck him when he was reporting on the impact of the Syrian civil war on queer and trans people. During a trip to Turkey, he interviewed LGBTQ+ Syrians who were living in shared apartments with people who supported Islamist groups. “They could not be out, even in exile,” he says.
This time, in Ukraine, things were different. Although at the onset of the full-scale invasion the country’s track record when it came to LGBTQ+ rights was poor compared with its European neighbours, Feder noted that there was a greater willingness from the community to speak with him openly compared with conflicts he had previously covered. “I thought this was a real opportunity to create what I think is the first visual history of a queer community in wartime,” explains Feder of how the idea for his book came about. “Also the range of stories I was hearing about the many ways that being queer affected your experience of armed conflict.”
Feder says that LGBTQ+ Ukrainians did not solely speak of their experiences of being targeted for violence, because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. There were people who were trying to seek refuge abroad and having issues with their immigration status, for example, because they were not legally married to their partners. “There were stories of soldiers who are fighting for partnership rights, because they’re concerned about their partners not being able to claim their bodies if they’re killed in combat,” recalls Feder. “That was fascinating to me.”
Another striking difference about this conflict was the queer visibility amongst serving military personnel. Featured in The Queer Face of War is Viktor Pylypenko, who first volunteered to fight in his country’s armed forces when Russia annexed the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. From 2014 to 2015, he fought in battles against Russia’s occupation of Donbas. Pylypenko’s motives to join the military, as he told Feder, were in part tied to his hopes that the military would turn him straight. He subsequently came out as a gay in 2018 and founded Ukraine’s first organisation for LGBTQ+ soldiers, before returning to the front line as a medic.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Pylypenko’s organisation has grown to 600 members, and its social media campaigns have been an important tool in boosting public support for LGBTQ+ rights. “Ukraine is the first conflict that I’ve covered like this, where you had out people serving in the military,” says Feder of the LGBTQ+ visibility on the frontlines of this war. “In Ukraine, it’s been really important. There’s been a huge surge in queer soldiers coming out, and the LGBT military organisation has been very smart in using its social media feed to highlight the story of queer soldiers. They very clearly make the case to Ukrainians that queer people are just as patriotic, and are fighting as hard, as everybody else.”
Access to the military for LGBTQ+ people is important in changing public perceptions, argues Feder. “It is really important for marginalised groups, because it is the strongest argument against people who want to say that these people don’t deserve to be fully citizens,” he tells me. “It is really important in building a broader political consensus that queer people should have all the same rights as other citizens.”
Of the 100 soldiers Pylypenko started with, only six remained when he was discharged in 2024 – the human cost of this conflict has been felt on both sides of the border. Whilst the Kremlin does not publish official figures on the number of casualties on the battlefield, the UK Ministry of Defence estimated that Russia had suffered 1.25 million casualties overall, yet this was probably an under-estimate. When it comes to Ukrainian deaths, the country’s president said in a statement at the start of the year that 55,000 Ukrainians had died, yet some sources put that figure to be almost four times higher.
A defaced poster of Anna Zyablikova, LGBTQ+ activist and soldier, on the building that used to house Kharkiv’s LGBTQ+ community centre, a frequent target of right-wing groups. (J. Lester Feder)When I ask Feder about why he thinks Ukrainian queer people were willing to speak with him openly during this particular conflict, he replies that this war is about their right to exist “not only as Ukrainians, but as queer people.” In the decade since he started reporting on Ukraine, he has noticed an important shift in the country’s attitudes towards the LGBTQ+ community. “There’s been a lot of really incredible work done to make Ukraine much more accepting, and safer for people to be out as Ukrainians than it is in most other places [of conflict].”
In the four years since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the country’s stance on LGBTQ+ rights has slowly started to change. After meeting then-US president Joe Biden at the White House in 2021, the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that his country would continue to address discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. Despite the Ukrainian leader publicly backing civil partnerships for same-sex couples in 2022, according to a report by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), there are still constitutional prohibitions on same-sex marriage and an ongoing resistance to civil partnership legislation in parliament. That said, the report does highlight a shift in public attitudes towards queer and trans people, “driven in part by the visible contributions of LGBTI people on the front lines.”
In parallel to the strides being taken to make Ukraine more accepting, Feder is also keen to highlight what is happening in Russia. There has been a ramping up, as he puts it, of attacks on LGBTQ+ people in the country. Originally drawn up in 2013, Russia’s so-called gay propaganda laws were significantly amended in 2022. “Most alarmingly, the declaration of LGBT organisations as extremist organisations, which essentially means that queer activists can be prosecuted under terrorism laws,” says Feder.
As someone who is of Ukrainian descent, this conflict feels a little closer to home for Feder. “I have an awareness that if my ancestors had not left Ukraine,” he says, “this would be my experience. I would be growing up in one of these cities.”
Now based in the United States, I ask Feder about the impact US foreign policy is having on the LGBTQ+ people living through this conflict. “I think that the turn against LGBT rights in the United States and in some European countries is really alarming in this context, because there’s no longer that investment,” he replies. “The United States was the backbone in funding the global LGBT movement, and so the decimation in international aid funding really has caused a global crisis for queer organisations.”
Following the January 2025 inauguration, president Trump signed an executive order that called for a 90-day pause on all US foreign development assistance programmes, including those supporting LGBTQ+ people across the world. It was a decision that saw the derailing of programmes across the globe, and the eventual shuttering of the world’s largest agency for foreign aid, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
That said, Washington is not alone in scaling back efforts on LGBTQ+ rights, a number of European governments are also retreating; greater spending on defence, for instance, is taking priority. “Civil society was supporting queer people in Ukraine, and other places where there were real security and democratic rights concerns,” denotes Feder, who believes these funding cuts are going to be “causing problems for years” for the international LGBTQ+ rights movement.
One international LGBTQ+ rights organisation that has been working with Ukrainian activists during this conflict is All Out. “As Russia’s full-scale invasion enters its fifth year, it is clear that this war has never been only about territory – it has also been an ideological assault on human rights, including the lives of queer people,” the organisation’s Director of Programs, Mathias Wasik, told me. “From the very first night of the invasion, Russian leaders framed the war as a fight against so-called ‘Western values,’ while state media fueled anti-LGBT+ propaganda and queer Ukrainians have been targeted with sexual violence, abuse, and persecution.”
The organisation has partnered with Feder to amplify the voices of LGBTQ+ Ukrainians from The Queer Face of War, as a means of mobilising international support for the country’s queer and trans people. “All Out’s collaboration with J. Lester Feder powerfully documents those realities and connects them to the urgent legal gaps that continue to leave LGBT+ families unprotected,” says Wasik, adding that his organisation believes that human rights do not pause during times of war.
“For years, we have turned global solidarity into direct, life-saving support, distributing tens of thousands of dollars to community-led organisations providing shelters, medical care, evacuation support, and legal assistance,” he continues. “We have worked alongside partners in Ukraine and neighbouring countries to ensure protection reaches those most at risk.”
Dana Panasiuk and Anastasia Kotenko fell in love in Odesa, at a shelter run by the trans organization T-South. (J. Lester Feder)As described by Wasik, many Ukrainian LGBTQ+ organisations have found themselves working beyond their original mission and scope. When war broke out, the Ukrainian LGBTQ+ community turned to these organisations for help. “I was blown away by how much work was being done by LGBT organisations to provide direct humanitarian assistance,” says Feder of what he witnessed on the ground in Ukraine. “These were political organisations. They were social organisations. They were not set up to run shelters, or provide food relief, or help with border issues or any of those kinds of things. Overnight, they transformed themselves into humanitarian operations to support people. And that was pretty remarkable.”
This conflict is entering its fifth year. Russia now occupies approximately 20% of Ukraine, with the impact of this full-scale invasion being felt across the country. There is certainly an undeniable sense of resilience from the Ukrainian people, but I ask Feder how the population’s mood is fairing given this seemingly never-ending war. “The mood, certainly in Kyiv, Odessa and other major cities, is really bad right now,” he says of what he is being told by people living in the country. Ongoing power cuts and disruption to energy supplies, coupled with a bitterly cold winter, are making living conditions extremely challenging today.
As for the future of this war? “Ukraine is shouldering more and more of this burden on their own, and they really can’t do it without international support. It’s incredibly hard to sustain.”
J. Lester Feder is an award-winning photographer and journalist. His book The Queer Face of War is published by Verlag Kettler.
