Securitising gender: Implications of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine for LGBTQ Movements in Eastern Europe

In a sermon pronounced in March 2022, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow justified Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine with the need to defend the Donbas from Western-sponsored Pride marches. Over the past year, Russia has further cracked down on LGBTQ rights through laws outlawing expressions of so-called “nontraditional sexual relations” and gender transition procedures. Feminist scholars have highlighted the centrality of gender orders in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a war fought for the so-called traditional values and against an imagination of Europe as a ‘liberal place’ (Kratochvil and O’Sullivan 2023). However, its regional reverberations and implications for gender and anti-gender politics in the Eastern European space region deserve further exploration. This paper examines how the shifting regional security landscape is reconfiguring the struggles between opponents of sexual and gender equality and LGBTQ movements in Ukraine and Georgia with the full-fledged Russian aggression, on the one hand, and increased credibility of EU membership and approximation of the countries in the EU neighborhood with Brussels. Drawing on the Copenhagen School’s theory of securitization, the paper unravels the changing discursive construction of LGBTQ rights as a security issue. We show how the full-scale invasion has engendered an unlikely coalition between right-wing and LGBTQ groups in Ukraine, as part of a fight for the nation’s survival and emancipation from Russia. Conversely, the Georgian government’s pragmatic maintaining of relations with Russia and authoritarian turn in the aftermath of the invasion has emboldened homophobic mobilisation, exacerbating existing insecurities for LGBTQ people. Building on a combination of qualitative methods, including critical discourse analysis and frame analysis, the paper provides original evidence on how the Russian invasion of Ukraine reconfigures anti-genderism and its effects on LGBTQ lives in the Eastern European region. Overall, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on the role gender and sexuality play within international security.