LGBTQ Ukrainian soldiers can risk their lives for the state, but if they are wounded or killed, the partners who love them remain legal strangers in the eyes of that state.
The European Court of Human Rights found in 2023 that Ukraine’s lack of legal recognition for same-sex couples was discriminatory and violated the right to private and family life. A bill to create registered partnerships was introduced that year, but it remains stuck in Parliament. The legal gap has always been unbearable; then the full-scale war with Russia seemed as though it would make that disparity untenable.
Surely, queer soldiers visibly defending the nation from the front line would render the hypocrisy of Ukrainian law too obvious to sustain. Yet, the gap remains.
LGBTQ Ukrainians in uniform sometimes wear a unicorn patch on their fatigue dress, a wry response to claims that there are no gays in the Ukrainian military. They volunteer, pay taxes, evacuate civilians and mourn fallen comrades. Some have been wounded, others killed. At Kyiv Pride last month, marchers carried photographs of LGBTQ soldiers killed in action alongside rainbow flags and banners.
The argument is simple: those soldiers’ partners waited through the same anxious nights as other partners, feared the same phone calls and carried the same grief. Do they not then have the same right to stand beside a hospital bed? To receive vital medical information or make critical decisions during a crisis? To arrange a burial, inherit shared property or receive state benefits?
Some argued the war should postpone these questions. Rather, the conflict has made them impossible to put off. In the first months after Russia’s invasion, a petition urging the government to consider registered partnerships received enough support to trigger a parliamentary debate, leading to the draft legislation.
But the bill stalled. Opponents argued there are more pressing issues to address, that sexuality is purely private, that Pride rallies are a masquerade, that the state should not interfere with love, or that Ukraine should first win the war before discussing civil rights.
Early this year, a new draft of the civil code was proposed that would continue to define the family unit as an exclusively different-sex partnership, explicitly exclude same-sex families and automatically annul a marriage if one of the spouses legally changes gender. Beneath these arguments lies a clear demand: that LGBTQ people exist only quietly — without visibility, without legal recognition, without family status and without a place in the national narrative.
In March, a Supreme Court ruling recognised a same-sex couple as a family under Ukrainian law. However, the bill that would exclude such couples continued its advance in April, despite sharp criticism from human rights groups and despite its incompatibility with membership in the European Union, which Ukraine seeks.
No one is asking the state to regulate love. The state already regulates the practical consequences of a shared life — property, inheritance, medical decisions, children, pensions, documents, burial and family status. LGBTQ advocates are simply calling for the state to stop discriminating at the hospital door, the notary’s desk, the military office and the cemetery. According to a Kyiv International Institute of Sociology poll, commissioned by gay rights outfit Nash Svit, Ukrainians who said LGBTQ people should have the same rights as other citizens rose to 78.1% in 2025, up from 63.7% in 2022.
Russian propaganda has long portrayed queerness as part of Western decadence and what amounts to state repression as tradition. Ukraine cannot defeat Russian imperialism on the battlefield only to preserve some of its inherited habits of humiliation at home. In Russia, even expressions of queer identity are banned, and transition surgery is illegal. President Vladimir Putin has characterised the war as part of the fight to maintain “traditional Russian values.”
In 2023, Ukraine adopted the Law on Decolonisation to remove representations of Russian imperial policy from public spaces. But decolonisation is not only changing street names, removing monuments or returning Ukrainian literature to the centre of national life. It is also refusing the old hierarchies of shame. A country does not become free merely by changing its geopolitical direction. It becomes free when it stops building unity on the invisibility of its people. Freedom is also the right to hold the hand of the one you love without the state pretending that person is no one.