(Editor’s note: The International Women’s Media Foundation’s Women on the Ground: Reporting from Ukraine’s Unseen Frontlines Initiative in partnership with the Howard G. Buffett Foundation funded this reporting. This report is exclusive to the Washington Blade.)

Ukraine’s LGBTQ war heroes have a chance to build a community and share their courage.

Despite Russian drones raining down on the capital, Kyiv’s gay military and veteran community gathers in a freshly redecorated safe space called “K-41.” The club has been a boiling pot this summer — Ukrainian, German, Dutch, and Portuguese DJs played music on warm September nights, guests gathered to dance, listen to lectures, or see a movie in the leafy garden outside. 

One of the recent lectures was on “Practices for Non-Discrimination for LGBTQ people in the Workplace.” For many community members, the workplace is now the front, where they continue to fight and defend their country from Russian troops attacking Ukraine’s eastern, northern, and southern regions. And on rejoining the community for a break, veterans take up a different fight, for their human rights, against discrimination. Their fight does not stop on the front lines.

The number of LGBTQ heroes is growing; so is the number of fallen, sadly. There is a wall at the center covered in soldiers’ patches.

People gather outside K-41, on September 9, 2025. (Washington Blade photo by Caroline Gutman)

“Soldiers and veterans pop in and stick their insignias to this wall — we have welcomed more than 700 members into our LGBTQ veteran and military club,” one of the center’s founders, 38-year-old veteran, Victor Pylypenko, told the Washington Blade with pride. Openly gay, he volunteered and fought for his country from 2014-2016 and then again from 2022-2024.

Victor Pylypenko, a Ukrainian veteran and co-founder of K-41, poses for a portrait, on September 9, 2025. (Washington Blade photo by Caroline Gutman)

Giving us a tour of the club on a recent night, Pylypenko pointed out a portrait on the wall of another war hero, the newly elected leader of the “Ukrainian LGBT Military Personnel and Veterans for Equal Rights” NGO, Oleksandr Demenko. He is a survivor of the hellish battle for Mariupol and 20 months of horrific imprisonment in Russia.

“I always eat all the edges of the pizza, because I know that my brothers in arms do not have enough food or enough water in jail right now,” Demenko wrote, sharing his emotions recently with his Facebook readers.

A decorated officer, Demenko was among about 2,500 Ukrainian soldiers defending Azov Steel, a giant Soviet-era steel plant that was surrounded during the battle for the city of Mariupol from February to May, 2022. 

Thanks to the British photographer Jesse Glazzard, who followed the lives of Ukrainian gay soldiers, Elton John helped Ukraine’s queer heroes.

“Elton John and his partner, David Furnish, bought a photograph by Glazzard in May and gave funds for our reconstruction of this center,” Pylypenko told the Blade. “We fixed the two rooms of the space nicely, bought furniture and the movie screen for our LGBTQ veterans — the biggest community for a military in Eastern Europe.”

Oleksandr Demenko, director of Ukrainian LGBT Military Personnel and Veterans for Equal Rights, poses for a portrait, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on September 15, 2025.(Washington Blade photo by Caroline Gutman)

Demenko and his boyfriend recently became engaged, and the fight for the legalization of gay marriage became personal. Both Pylypenko and Demenko came to Kyiv’s Court of Appeals last month to support the first legal marriage.

“Every gay couple in our country hopes for President Zelensky to allow us to marry. This is our human right, along with every citizen,” the decorated veteran Demenko said in a recent interview. 

To most members of this community, the war started in 2014 with Russia annexing the Crimean Peninsula. As many self-defense volunteers, Pylypenko, joined to defend his country in the Eastern regions of Ukraine. He served for nearly two years. There was too much homophobia at the time, so he stayed in the closet during his service. On coming home to Kyiv, Pylypenko tried to reconstruct his peaceful life, went to university and finished a master’s program in technical and scientific translation from English and French. 

But the conflict with Russia did not stop; it escalated to Russia’s full-scale invasion early on the morning of Feb. 24, 2022. Pylypenko was visiting his parents in the town of Borodianka, a suburb north of Kyiv. Russian shelling blew up and burned buildings in Borodianka, killing hundreds of civilians. 

Without thinking twice, Pylypenko volunteered to defend his country again, this time openly gay.

“At some point, I took out my cell phone with rainbow stickers from K-41 club; and my sergeant asked me if I was gay in front of everybody. I answered yes. The commander, who was only 22 years old, did not have any problems with that,” Pylypenko said. 

During the battle for Kyiv, his platoon was defending the capital from the trenches on freezing cold days and nights, and saved lives of their wounded brothers in arms by evacuating them to hospitals. Pylypenko’s military experience was useful. And after Kyiv, he fought in the Sumy and Kharkiv regions. Some campaigns turned out “disastrous,” he said. 

Last year, Pylypenko had to resign to take care of his father, who was “like a baby after a stroke.” The law allowed that. Shortly after his return from the front, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church honored him for “Courage and Love for Ukraine.”

“I thanked the church and Patriarch Filaret, previously famous for stating that gays had created COVID-19. I expressed my hopes that the priest would reject his homophobia; but immediately, the same day he cancelled his medal to me,” Pylypenko said. “Immediately, a flash mob began, soldiers who had previously received that same medal denounced it in solidarity with me. The soldiers’ brotherhood is great.” 

Framed photographs of rallies and other gatherings, on a wall at Insight, on September 9, 2025. (Washington Blade photo by Caroline Gutman)

The battle for survival during the war is tiring. The battle for human rights in the war-torn country is exhausting. The LGBTQ community is vibrant, active and well-organized in Ukraine. Its activists across the country fight for human rights, judicial reform and against corruption together with prominent civil liberties groups. Olena Shevchenko, 42-year-old leader of Insight, a group focusing on LGBTQ and feminist activism, says there is no time to live: “I have no life. I have a constant fight.” 

The Insight community center is a cozy house in the hipster part of Kyiv’s old town, Podil. For nearly four years, Insight activists have been providing aid, legal support and shelter for their community, organizing art exhibits and taking part in anti-corruption and pro-democracy campaigns.

Olena Shevchenko, leader of Insight, poses for a portrait, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on September 8, 2025. (Washington Blade photo by Caroline Gutman)

“Three days ago, homophobes attacked our center in Lviv and before that our center in Ivano-Frankivsk; some thugs stormed our exhibition in the city of Chernovtsy,” Shevchenko told the Blade. “They come again and again, break windows, spray walls with paint that imitates blood. Their goal is to block our events. They spray tear gas, terrify our activists.” 

Shevchenko said that the attacks on the LGBTQ centers around the country are organized by far-right groups.

“One group is called Carpathian Sich, another Brotherhood, led by Dmytro Korchinsky and various new groups and networks frequently launched, like Tradition and Order,” she said. “We noticed that they received some amount of money about a year ago. They put around homophobic posters and aggressive stickers — we can tell that the money is coming to them. If before, money came from Russia, now they get funded from the U.S. as well.”

In spite of the attacks and risks, the community lives. Shevchenko, as many Ukrainians in the rear, saw her fight for human rights and against corruption as just as important as the fight on the frontline.

“If we don’t fight for democracy, who will do it? Our country would look bad if we stop. This is not just about LGBTQ, this is about freedom, democracy and the spirit that you can fight for something that is right,” she said. “Our government should be reminded about how good we are still at self-organization. We’ll be always here, this our own front. We have to keep track of democracy on all levels.”

Unicorn Battalion patches at K-41, in Kyiv, Ukraine, on September 9, 2025. (Washington Blade photo by Caroline Gutman)