Blackmailed gay men are being forced to fight Vladmir Putin’s war in Ukraine

Chechen human rights group SK SOS has reported gay men in the Russian republic are being forcibly conscripted into Russia’s war with Ukraine. One man has died in the fighting.

As reported in a Telegram post by the outlawed organization — established in 2021 to provide assistance to LGBTQ+ individuals facing life-threatening persecution, discrimination, and abuse in Chechnya — a new wave of detentions in August follows the forced recruitment of gay men that started shortly before President Vladimir Putin’s “partial mobilization” of Russian men into the army in September 2022.

Related:

Gay man from Chechnya who was tortured in a police station finally escaped Russia

He was outed by a group of local extortionists and held in a police station basement.

At least seven men detained for being gay have been blackmailed into “volunteering” for the war, given a choice to pay an exorbitant “ransom” of 1.5 million rubles (over €14,000) or to enlist. At least one of those men has died as a result.

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In 2017, Chechnya undertook a purge of LGBTQ+ people, described in a report by the Council of Europe in 2021 as “the single most egregious example of violence against LGBTI people in Europe that has occurred in decades.”

Hundreds of LGBTQ+ individuals were entrapped through dating apps, reported by neighbors, and rounded up at LGBTQ+ gathering places, then tortured in a network of secret prisons. Over 100 gay men are estimated to have died in the state-sponsored persecution between 2017 and 2019. 

The September 4 Telegram post by SK SOS detailed an “increasing wave of detentions” of gay men in Chechnya in late August this year. Security forces are using the same methods of entrapping gay men in the forced recruitment effort, then using their social media accounts to set up dates with other men and detain them for the same purpose.

State authorities’ methodology of terror has been the same since their first forced recruitments in 2022, with fabricated criminal charges and warnings of pre-trial detention — where detainees’ sexual orientation would be revealed to fellow inmates — followed by blackmailing them into the army.

In 2023, another raid in Chechnya netted several members of the LGBTQ+ community. While the women among them were released to their families the same evening, four men were forcibly sent to Ukraine, SK SOS reported. Their fates remain unknown.

Russia and Chechnya have been closely allied in their harassment of LGBTQ+ citizens in the one-time breakaway republic. In February last year, a 28-year-old gay Chechen refugee was arrested in Moscow as he tried to return to the Netherlands. He was traveling home after attending his father’s funeral.

In 2021, two young gay men who escaped from Chechnya after being tortured were caught by Russian police and returned to Chechen custody, the Russia LGBT Network reported. The pair were forced to make apology videos, among other humiliations.

Earlier this year, SK SOS reported that a gay man held in detention and tortured for over a year in the basement of a Grozny police station was inexplicably released and escaped to Europe. Rizvan Dadayev was detained by police in the summer of 2022 after he was outed by a group of local extortionists in the Chechen capital in a video distributed online, SK SOS told The Moscow Times.  

Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has long held that “no gays” live in Chechnya. 

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