'Wear It or We Will Beat You to Death' (Russian Persecution of LGBT Ukranians)
Oleksii Polukhin’s 64 days in detention began when Russian soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint. They found that he’d been gathering information about Russian military positions to share with Ukrainian forces; they also discovered he was gay. Mr. Polukhin gave a detailed account of his detention to Projector, an Odesa-based human rights organization. He also confirmed the details to me in a series of interviews.
It was May 2022, just 10 weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Polukhin lived in Kherson, a southern city of around 250,000 people that the Russians conquered with blinding speed in the war’s early days. Mr. Polukhin, rail thin and then 22 years old, was on his way to take pictures of a May 9 Victory Day parade organized by the occupying forces, which he planned to send to a network that shared information from occupied territory. He had been keeping close track of the locations of Russian checkpoints, he said, but this new one caught him by surprise. He was forced to unlock his phone for the soldiers, where they discovered L.G.B.T.Q. Telegram channels, including one that he ran.
Mr. Polukhin recalled one of the guards calling him an anti-gay slur and forcing him to strip naked on the street. (This is a common practice by Russian forces, nominally to search for nationalist tattoos.) After he was dressed again, Mr. Polukhin said, the soldiers took the opportunity to humiliate him further, calling over a random passerby to ask what should be done with gays in his city.
“I think that all of them should be killed,” Mr. Polukhin said the man responded.
Once they’d had their fun on the street, Mr. Polukhin said the soldiers forced him into a vehicle and beat him, called him homophobic names and demanded he give up the names of other queer Khersonians. They drove him blindfolded on a roundabout route before dumping him at a detention center, which Mr. Polukhin guessed had been a Ukrainian police station. He said he was left to stew for a time in a holding cell with four other prisoners, who told him the guards had said he was gay.
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