Scammers, robbers, and attackers are exploiting the “LGBT extremism” and “gay propaganda” laws to threaten LGBTQIA+ people and justify crimes against them. We found several recent cases illustrating how perpetrators weaponise these discriminatory laws. It might be a sign of escalating persecution of LGBTQIA+ people in Russia. As evidence from other countries shows, discriminatory laws become a tool of violence for both the state and non-state groups, such as vigilantes.
Returning home from work, a man noticed two strangers at the entrance of his apartment complex. One of them stepped forward, showed his police ID and said:
“Due to your lifestyle and non-traditional sexual orientation, you are a member of the banned extremist organisation International public LGBT movement, which is grounds for your detention.”
The officer then asked to enter the man’s apartment “to clarify the situation”. Inside, he began searching the rooms and asking whether the man possessed any prohibited items or substances while the other scrolled through his phone. The officer who searched the apartment threatened the man with arrest and prosecution. Then came an alternative: he could pay a “fine” to make the problem disappear. Using online banking on the man’s phone, the officer transferred 515,000 rubles (around €5,300) to a bank account later revealed to belong to his mother.
“You can live peacefully now”, the officer said, and the two men left.
We learned of this case from a court decision published by the Nalchik City Court in December 2024. The crime itself had occurred six months earlier, in June. Both men involved were, in fact, police officers. The man who extorted the money held the rank of police captain and worked as a detective in the criminal investigations unit. He was prosecuted and convicted of fraud committed through abuse of office. His colleague, present and actively involved in the crime, was treated only as a witness during the trial.
The perpetrator did not know the victim personally. He had obtained the man’s phone number and address a few days before the crime. While investigating another incident, he got access to private messages, saw a conversation between the victim and another man, and assumed both of them were of “non-traditional sexual orientation”. He then saw an opportunity to scheme the extortion and enlisted his colleague for assistance.
The court sentenced the officer to 1,5 years of suspended imprisonment and barred him from working in law enforcement for two years. According to the decision, the victim recovered his money.

The building of the Department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia for the city of Nalchik (in the centre), where the police officer who extorted the money worked. Nalchik, Baysultanova St., 11А. March 2025. Source: yandex.com.
The Nalchik case is the first one known to us in which a perpetrator referenced the “LGBT extremism” law as an extortion mechanism. It is also an example of a hate crime because the perpetrator targeted the victim based on his sexual orientation, assumed to be “non-traditional”. In hate crime cases we identified before, victims were usually threatened with violence or outing to family and friends. This case shows a new type of threat when an offender references the “LGBT extremism” law.
Apart from the extremism law, there are other discriminatory laws in Russia, such as the “gay propaganda” ban. We found more cases when perpetrators use them for extortion or justification for attacking LGBTQIA+ people.
By searching keywords in court decisions, we found seven cases where perpetrators mentioned anti-LGBTQIA+ laws in their testimonies. What someone says before, during, or after committing a hate crime matters. Their words can help determine the motive and establish that victims were targeted because of their characteristics, such as sexual orientation. We analysed the found cases: what types of crimes they are about, when and where they happened, and in what situations perpetrators referenced anti-LGBTQIA+ laws and why.
Perpetrators from different Russian regions began mentioning anti-LGBTQIA+ laws during or after crimes in recent years
Previously, we published a database of hate crimes against LGBTQIA+ people in Russia from 2010 through 2023. As we were updating this database with the cases from 2024, we noticed that more perpetrators began referencing anti-LGBTQIA+ laws during crimes or in court.
The earliest case we found describes a crime from 2019. Two cases involve crimes from 2021 and 2022, and the remaining four were published by courts in 2024. This time span suggests that perpetrators have begun to weaponise the existing anti-LGBTQIA laws in recent years.
In six of the seven cases, crimes were committed by two or more perpetrators. The crimes were classified differently by courts: extortion, robbery, robbery with violence, fraud, and grievous bodily harm. One crime resulted in the victim’s death.
The cases span the whole country, from Moscow to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky city in the Far East. Two cases are from the same region, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, and the other two happened in the North Caucasus. This geographic distribution shows that perpetrators from different regions, from big cities and smaller towns, are aware of the anti-LGBTQIA+ laws and know how to exploit them.
See all seven cases on the map.
The geographical information is according to geoboundaries.org
"They'll put you away for propaganda": what anti-LGBTQIA+ laws perpetrators refer to and why
Among the seven cases we found, five contain phrases referring to the so-called “gay propaganda” ban. There is one case that mentions the extremism law. In one more case, two perpetrators said to the victim during the attack that “the [non-traditional] direction of sexual minorities is undesirable on the state level”, “there will never be an LGBT movement in the country”, and they should “protect family values”, as “their president” stated.
One of the possible reasons why we found more mentions of “gay propaganda” is that this law has been in force for more than a decade in Russia. And it was updated and expanded in 2022. The “LGBT extremism” law is relatively new, it was introduced in November 2023. So, the perpetrators might be more familiar with the first one. In one case, a perpetrator even said the exact formulation as it appears in the law: “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”.
On the timeline below, see how the Russian anti-LGBTQIA+ policies progressed over the years.
We identified two ways in which perpetrators used the anti-LGBTQIA+ laws: to threaten the victims and justify their violence.
In three of the seven cases, perpetrators used the anti-LGBTQIA+ laws to threaten and extort money, including the Nalchik case we have described. Below, we describe two other cases. They were schemed as fake dates.
In Pyatigorsk city in Stavropol Krai, which is just 90 km away from Nalchik, two perpetrators arranged to meet with a man they found through a Telegram dating group. When they met him, they posed as law enforcement officers, showing their fake police ID cards. They demanded 30,000 rubles (around €330) from the victim, so that he wouldn”t be prosecuted for “the crime related to the propaganda” of LGBT. One of the perpetrators was later exempt from criminal liability.
Another case when perpetrators threatened a victim, referring to the “gay propaganda” ban, happened in Moscow. It is also a fake date, which one of the four perpetrators arranged with a man through the dating app Twinby. They invited the victim into their car and demanded money, threatening him with violence and not letting him leave. Read the testimony of one of the perpetrators below:
<…> They got into a car, and he [defendant] started saying that he [victim] would be “put away for propaganda”, threatened to take him to the police station, and also to hit him in the face. <…> they intended to take [victim’s] money, relying on the assumption that, being a person of non-traditional orientation, he would not contact law enforcement, and no one would look for him. <…>
The purpose of the meeting was to see what a person of non-traditional orientation looks like and to make fun of him [victim], specifically: to frighten him with threats of taking him to the police station for his non-traditional orientation, and also to spread information about him to others.
Court verdict no. 01-0300/2024 by the Tverskoy District Court of Moscow on 13.08.2024
In the other four cases, perpetrators referenced anti-LGBTQIA+ laws in their court testimonies in an attempt to justify their actions and seek mitigating circumstances to reduce punishment.
For example, in an appellate ruling, an accused asked the court to reduce his 9,5 years sentence because of the victim’s “immoral behaviour”:
[Defendant] notes that the reason for committing the crime <…> was the immoral behaviour of K.G.A. [victim], who proposed to have sexual intercourse with him. This provoked A.A. [the defendant’s] moral condemnation <…>, because the victim’s behaviour was sharply different from the traditional views on relations between genders accepted in modern Russian society. <…>
[Defendant] considers such behaviour [of the victim] to be propaganda of homosexualism and a disrespectful attitude towards society. In this regard, [he] considers the court’s indication of the absence of unlawful behaviour in the actions of K.G.A. [victim] to be unfounded.
Appellate ruling no. 22-3292/2020 by Volgograd Regional Court on 03.09.2020
This crime happened in January 2019 in Volzhskiy town (Volgograd region in Southern Russia). Two men reacted with violence when the victim allegedly made a sexual proposition while having drinks with them. The attackers beat the victim severely, hitting and kicking him in his head several times, causing deadly injuries. Neither perpetrator succeeded in reducing their sentence in the appeal court.
Anti-LGBTQIA+ laws fuel violence
The fact that perpetrators from different Russian regions used anti-LGBTQIA+ laws for extortion and justification in different circumstances signals that these cases are not isolated but systematic: legal norms become an instrument of violence against marginalised people.
The experience of other countries with even harsher legislation shows what anti-LGBTQIA+ laws could lead to. For example, in some African countries, researchers and human-rights organisations track how anti-LGBTQIA+ laws are weaponised by both the state authorities and non-state individuals or vigilante groups.
The Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Act (AHA) led to a surge of anti-LGBTQIA+ incidents when it was first enacted in 2014. This law was reintroduced in 2023 and set life imprisonment for “homosexual acts”, a maximum of 10 years imprisonment for “attempted homosexual acts”, and 20 years for “promoting homosexuality”, among other punishments. In 2023, the number of attacks, evictions, and arrests of LGBTQIA+ individuals rose again. Before the AHA enactment, in July 2022, the organisation Human Rights Awareness and Promotion Forum in Uganda (HRAPF) collected 28 cases. A year later, there were already 84 cases, including 53 with “deliberate homophobia”, and perpetrators were primarily non-state actors. Some cases are similar to the ones we observe in Russia:
“A man was arrested after a person he had met on a dating app turned against him and demanded money from him in exchange for not reporting him as a homosexual to the police.”
Reported by HRAPF, July 1st, 2023, the case code HRAPF/PA/96/2023
In Nigeria, another country where homosexuality has already been criminalised since colonial times, the government passed the Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA) in 2014. This law not only bans same-sex marriage or civil partnership, but also prohibits public display of such relationships or any LGBTQIA+ related initiatives like clubs or nonprofits. Human Rights Watch documented that the SSMPA “officially authorizes abuses against LGBT people, effectively making a bad situation worse.” For example, in 2014, vigilantes assaulted multiple presumed gay men in the area close to Abuja, the Nigerian capital. During the attacks, they chanted that they were “doing [President Goodluck] Jonathan”s work: cleansing the community of gays.”
Researchers point out that over 6 years since the enactment of the SSMPA, the number of reported cases of violence against LGBTQIA+ Nigerians tripled. Similarly to Uganda, the majority of these cases are violations by non-state actors. Nigerian police also use anti-LGBTQIA+ laws to justify raids, arbitrary arrests, and bribe-taking.
Russian police, since the Supreme Court’s decision on “LGBT extremism”, raided queer bars, clubs, and spaces all over the country at least 42 times. In some cases, the official reasons for these raids were fighting against “LGBT propaganda” and “extremism”.
The use of the “gay propaganda” and “LGBT extremism” laws by perpetrators and police in Russia is a troubling indication of escalating persecution of LGBTQIA+ people. As long as discriminatory laws remain, they provide perpetrators with both justification and opportunity. We will continue documenting hate crimes and discrimination to reveal the consequences of laws that put the lives of LGBTQIA+ people in danger.
The Grey Rainbow project is a collaboration between researchers and Dataout, a nonprofit that uncovers discrimination and crimes based on SOGIESC – sexual orientation, gender identity & expression, and sex characteristics. By conducting research and releasing open data, we aim to empower journalists, researchers, human rights advocates, and policymakers in creating a better social and legal environment for LGBTQIA+ people and others affected by SOGIESC-based discrimination.
greyrainbow@dataout.org
In the design of this website, we use illustrations taken from the watercolour series “Veshchdoc” (“Physical evidence”) by the artist Polina Zaslavskaya, who has kindly granted us permission for their use. The artist retains all rights to the images.