LGBTQ soldiers are fighting for Ukraine. Will Ukraine fight for them when the war is over?

Antonina Romanova grimaces as she describes the number of Russians she has killed on this typical day on the front lines of Bakhmut, site of the bloodiest battle in the war in Ukraine.

The transgender Ukrainian soldier can’t see the enemy as she attacks with mortar fire from behind the front line, she says. But Romanova must look at her victims’ maimed faces as she counts them on close-up drone footage each evening. For the 37-year-old actor — and former pacifist — the daily slaughter is painful.

“I never thought I would kill people,” she said in a monotone whisper.

“And I kill so many. It’s a very strange feeling.”

Romanova herself faces acute danger on the war’s front lines defending a country that still stigmatizes LGBTQ people against a violently homophobic enemy.

She might not have come out as non-binary if she had known she would be on the front line of war against Russia, she said in an interview over Zoom, speaking through a translator. Romanova, who looks masculine but uses she/her pronouns, has been fighting for months on Ukraine’s front line, where she fears assault not only by Russians but also by homophobic fellow soldiers.

“This not the safest place to be a non-binary person.”

Romanova has been called a sodomite and has been beaten and threatened with death by some of her countrymen. But as a mortar operator, she said, she protects her fellow soldiers on the battlefield by killing Russian infantry. And with each life she saves, the more accepted she becomes in the battalion.

“These are very tough battles here,” Romanova said. “We have many wounded and dead and never know who will be next.

“Our commander doesn’t care who we are as long as we are good fighters.”

The visibility of LGBTQ soldiers in the fight for Ukraine is fostering tolerance and acceptance in the mainly Orthodox Christian nation. Homosexuality was only legalized upon independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. Last summer, Ukraine’s parliament ratified the Council of Europe’s Istanbul convention on violence against women, after a decade-long delay caused by references in the document to “sexual orientation” and “gender.”

Then, in December 2022, parliament prohibited hate speech against the LGBTQ community. This reflected a turn against conservatives like the mayor of Ivano-Frankivsk, who recently told local media that “a gay man cannot be a patriot, only a Christian can be a patriot.”

But Ukraine still bars same-sex civil partnerships and changes to legal gender. The many LGBTQ solders fighting for Ukraine, like Romanova, hope their country will fight for them when the war is over, according to posts by the Ukrainian group LGBTIQ Military. If she dies, Romanova fears being buried as Anton Romanov in a grave far from her long-time partner, Oleksandr Zhuhan.

“I would like to be myself even after death,” she said.

Romanova’s war began in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, where she lived. The land grab shocked Ukraine’s LGBTQ community. President Vladimir Putin had been curtailing the rights of LGBTQ Russians, including the passage of a 2013 law that prohibited mention of LGBTQ topics among children. Ukrainians feared similar crackdowns under Moscow’s control.

In the first days of the Crimea invasion, Romanova and other Ukrainian defenders blocked the city hall of the capital, Simferopol, she said. But she had to flee when her resistance was discovered by right-wing radical group “Right Sector Crimea” and Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), making her an arrest target.

The top official in Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, told Russian news agency Itar-Tass at the time that gay people “have no chance” to survive in Crimea and that the peninsula does “not need such people.”

Romanova caught one of the last trains running between Crimea and Ukraine and has never returned.

So it felt natural for Romanova, whose military call sign is Crimea, to fight for her country when Russia launched its full-scale invasion in 2022. As the first missiles landed near Kyiv, Putin said one of the reasons he was attacking Ukraine was to protect “traditional values” against the West’s “false values” that are “contrary to human nature,” referring to the LGBTQ community.

Together with her partner, actor and acting teacher Oleksandr Zhuhan, Romanova spent the first day of the invasion hiding in the bathroom of their apartment in Kyiv to avoid shattering windows, but soon joined the fight.

Her first commander told Romanova it was wrong for her to use female pronouns. In another platoon, a chaplain told the couple that their fellow fighters feared God would punish them. Zhuhan quoted the chaplain in a recent interview:

“God burned Sodom and Gomorrah for homosexuality and the guys are afraid that mines will fall on them because they are in the same unit as you,” he said.

But the couple feels lucky with their current commander in Bakhmut, Romanova says. He does not tolerate homophobia.

“At first he was worried about mispronouncing my name and kept asking about my pronouns and whether he was using them correctly,” she said.

“I am now treated very well here.”

Romanova and Zhuhan met online in 2014. Romanova is slender and tall with round blue eyes. She speaks softly but with a sense of gravity. Zhuhan is short and wears round wire glasses. He speaks slowly and with emotion. Both are theatre professionals, vegans and activists. The couple connected just after Romanova arrived as a refugee in Kyiv. They joined one of Ukraine’s earliest Pride celebrations together.

The 2015 Kyiv Pride parade had just 250 marchers who came under sustained attack by dozens of counterprotesters, according to Amnesty International. But by 2021, 7,000 activists, flanked by police, marched in Kyiv’s last Pride gathering before the Russian invasion.

The way LGBTQ people like Romanova are demonstrating their commitment to defending Ukraine’s democracy is spawning public support to recognize their rights, according to Inna Sovsun, a member of parliament who is petitioning to allow same-sex civil partnerships.

“The Ukrainian LGBTQ community … fight in the war like others. And they deserve to have the same rights as everyone,” the lawmaker tweeted.

Romanova and Zhuhan have decorated their guns with stickers of a rainbow, a unicorn and a pineapple as a small act of resistance. Their hopes are for the future of Ukraine. But Romanova also dreams of a day when she can change the gender on her passport to non-binary and marry the man she loves.

“I think our war will never really end,” said Romanova.

“If we live to victory (against the Russians) we will still fight for the rest of our lives.”

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