“We are increasingly visible”

antonina romanova and Oleksandr Zhuhanaka Raccoon, are two of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of LGBTQ+ Ukrainians who have taken up arms to defend their country and their rights from the Russian invader, who they are fighting in the besieged city of Bakhmut, the hottest front in the war in Ukraine.

“Our job is to launch bombs with mortar batteries at the Russian soldiers who are attacking our territory and trying to advance,” Antonina Romanova, who is Zhuhan’s partner, tells Efe by phone, identifies herself as non-binary person and uses feminine pronouns to refer to herself.

“It has become our daily reality,” he says of the task that the Ukrainian army has assigned them since the end of January, when they presented themselves as volunteers to defend Ukrainian positions in one of the hardest battles of this war.

[Bakhmut, Vuhledar y ahora Limán: Rusia acumula fracasos al iniciar su nueva ofensiva]

Romanova and Zhuhan enlisted in their country’s Territorial Defense Forces just after Russia began its full-scale invasion on February 24 last year. “We could hide, flee to another city or take up arms, and it was immediately clear to us what was the right thing to do,” Romanova says.

“We would never have forgiven ourselves for doing anything else,” continues this former theater director for whom left kyivwhere she lived with her husband, would have been a second escape, after in 2014 he left his native Crimea after the Russian annexation of the peninsula.

No rights under Russia

Defending their country from the invader was their primary motivation for taking up arms, but both Romanova and Zhuhan are aware, as members of the LGBTQ+ community, that people like them would have no place in a model of society like Russia’swhich they have also fought in the south (Kherson) and the northeast (Kharkov).

Moscow has made hostility towards sexual minorities one of the hallmarks of its discourse abroad, and has passed laws that would put this couple of theater professionals in jail and LGBTQ+ activists turned soldiers.

[Rusia prohíbe la “propaganda de relaciones sexuales no tradicionales” y las iguala a la pedofilia]

“It is one of our reasons, but not the priority,” Romanova insists. “Russia is not a country that respects human rights, but our first motive is to protect our country,” stresses the theater director.

In addition to not being without military experience when they enlisted, Romanova and Zhuhan feared rejection from other soldiers because of their LGBTQ+ status. “Antonina defines herself as non-binary and uses female pronouns, which is what caused us the most concern,” recalls Zhuhan.

the unicorn patch

Although the situation is far from idyllic, and other LGBTQ+ soldiers are abused in the militarythe massive mobilization before the invasion, in which this community has participated, is helping to make sexual minorities more visible in the military, Zhuhan points out.

[La táctica de Ucrania: resiste en Bakhmut “lo que sea razonable” para lanzar su próximo contraataque]

“The more LGBTQ+ people are fighting, the more tolerant not only the army, but also Ukrainian society will be,” Zhuhan concludes.