Russia’s sweeping LGBTQ+ visibility purge. Six support groups outlawed this spring, one court ruling at a time, as “extremist organisations”

The most recent ruling came today, as the St Petersburg City Court declared the “Russian LGBT Network” (“LGBT Set”), the largest movement defending queer rights across the country’s regions, an “extremist organisation”. Founded as an advocacy and emergency-response platform and added to the Ministry of Justice’s “foreign agents” register in November 2021, the network is the most prominent victim of this crackdown.

“The court treated the defence of LGBT people’s rights, the monitoring of violations against queer people and the submission of reports to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Russia, Mariana Katzarova, as extremist activity,” lawyer Max Olenichev said after the ruling. “In essence, the ‘Russian LGBT Network’ has been banned for its human-rights work. This decision has nothing to do with law. The defence intends to appeal.”

The “Russian LGBT Network” was the sixth group outlawed since early March. On March 3, a St Petersburg court banned “Coming Out” (“Vykhod”), one of the country’s oldest queer support groups. On April 7, the “Resource Centre for LGBT” in Yekaterinburg, which had run counselling and legal aid in the Urals region, was declared “extremist” as well.

And then, came a sequence of rulings. on April 23, a court in the Oryol region banned “Parni+” (“Guys+”), an LGBTQ+ media project running since 2008. Its team said the ruling sought to criminalise visibility itself: “If queer people speak about themselves, this is ‘propaganda of visibility’; if they speak about discrimination, they are ‘opposing themselves to the state’; if they use inclusive language, they are ‘undermining traditional values’.” The group vowed to continue its activities despite the risks.  

The same day, the Moscow City Court banned the “Moscow Community Centre for LGBT+ Initiatives”, which has offered psychological and legal support to queer people since 2015. The organisation said it would carry on but suspend events that could not be held anonymously. The next day, a Samara court in southern Russia banned “Irida”, whose leader Artyom Fokin, a 33-year-old worker at the state oil giant Rosneft, was already facing criminal charges for organising an “extremist community” and for breaking “foreign agent” restrictions. 

According to Olenichev, the prosecution of “Irida” relied heavily on a “criminological characterisation” produced by four academics at the Nizhny Novgorod Academy of the Interior Ministry. Among the supposed proofs of extremism, he said, was the organisation’s correspondence with members of parliament: in one letter “Irida” had described Russia’s law banning “LGBT propaganda” as “absurd and unfounded”. That phrase, in the experts’ analysis, became evidence of the organisation’s extremism.

Three further bans are working their way through the courts. The “Centre T”, a Moscow-based initiative helping transgender people that has operated since 2020, learned in March that Moscow’s Ministry of Justice had filed for it to be designated “extremist”. “Yes, the court may give us this status,” its team said in a statement, “but we will not stop being creative or unlearn how to adapt to a new reality.” “Centre T” was added to the “foreign agents” register in 2023; its website was blocked the same year, and after one earlier hearing unidentified attackers sprayed pepper spray at its activists and lawyers as they left the courthouse. The current case is being heard behind closed doors after the files were classified as “secret”.

The Novosibirsk-based “T9 NSK”, a smaller initiative supporting trans people and their families, faces a hearing at the city’s Zheleznodorozhny District Court. Its founder, German Trubin, is named in the case. The project’s website is already offline and its social media channels have been deleted, suggesting that, as a working organisation, “T9 NSK” had effectively closed before the lawsuit landed.

The Yaroslavl-based “Callisto” is also awaiting a ruling.

The Prosecutor General’s Office also declared the “European Youth Forum”, an umbrella body of more than 100 youth organisations, an “undesirable organisation”, a status that effectively criminalises participation by Russian citizens. In its statement, the office cited the forum’s criticism of the war in Ukraine, accused it of “systematically disseminating slanderous and knowingly false information” and added that the forum “openly promotes the LGBT movement” and undermines “the traditional family and moral foundations of Russian society”. The forum had already been designated a “foreign agent” by the Russian Ministry of Justice in February.

The Supreme Court ban

The current crackdown rests on a single 2023 decision by Russia’s Supreme Court that declared the “International LGBT social movement” an “extremist organisation”. Because no such movement actually exists, the ruling functioned less as a ban on a specific entity than as a blanket suppression license against any initiative that could be associated with queer identity or rights. In the two and a half years since, rainbow flags, earrings, social media posts and even reviews of foreign television series have produced fines and criminal cases.

The crackdown has pulled in the book publishing industry. On April 23, investigators conducted a second round of searches at the Moscow offices of Eksmo, Russia’s largest book publisher, in a case linked to its now-defunct subsidiary Popcorn Books. Popcorn closed in January 2026; among its titles was the bestselling young-adult romance “Pioneer Summer”, about a love affair between a teenager and a camp counsellor, and its sequel.

According to the state news agency TASS, the Investigative Committee is now examining whether Eksmo executives accepted bribes from Popcorn Books employees. Eksmo’s chief executive Yevgeny Kapyev and several managers have been questioned as witnesses.

According to Shot, a Telegram channel, on former Popcorn editor has given testimony against Eksmo’s senior management. A senior Eksmo manager, Svetlana Tseplyaeva, is said to have told investigators that in 2024–2025 editors at the publisher released “extremist literature” from warehouses for cash, without paperwork, knowing that some copies would be sold to children.