Russia's Largest LGBTQ+ Rights Group Shuts Down After 'Terrorist' Designation

The Russian LGBT Network, the country’s largest and longest-running LGBTQ+ rights organization, announced on August 17 that it is shutting down entirely. The decision follows an April ruling by a St. Petersburg court that formally designated the group “extremist” — a label that, under Russia’s criminal code, is legally equivalent to terrorism and exposes anyone connected to the organization to prosecution.

“We made this decision after carefully assessing the risks. We cannot control the repressive environment, but we can do everything possible not to create additional risks for people. People’s safety comes first,” the organization’s leadership wrote in a statement posted to Telegram.

Nearly two decades of work, undone by a court filing

Founded in 2006, the Russian LGBT Network united more than a dozen regional LGBTQ+ organizations into the country’s largest coordinated effort to fight discrimination and document rights abuses. It is best known internationally for a program that quietly helped rescue dozens of gay men from Chechnya during the semi-autonomous republic’s campaign of arrest, torture, and extrajudicial “honor killings” against LGBTQ+ people — a campaign carried out with Moscow’s tacit approval and first exposed by independent Russian journalists in 2017.

The group’s undoing followed a familiar legal escalation. It was first labeled a “foreign agent” in November 2021, when the government accused it and several associates of using foreign funding to undermine the state. Two years later, in November 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court declared the vaguely defined “international LGBT movement” an extremist organization — a ruling human rights monitors warned at the time would be used to target specific groups one at a time. That’s exactly what has followed: the Russian LGBT Network’s April 2026 designation was one of nine such rulings against LGBTQ+ organizations so far this year, according to Human Rights Watch.

In its closing statement, the organization said its activists would stop operating under its name and that no one would continue to represent it publicly. Its social media accounts are being taken down.

“For many years, Russian LGBT Network brought together initiatives and activists and supported queer people across the country,” the group wrote. “However, its ‘extremist’ status has made the previous public format of its work impossible: any connection to the organization may create additional risks for the people we seek to support and protect.”

Part of a broader campaign

The Russian LGBT Network’s closure lands in a country where LGBTQ+ organizing has been under sustained legal attack since President Vladimir Putin signed the first “gay propaganda” law in 2013, banning the “promotion of nontraditional sexual relations” to minors. In 2022, that law was expanded to cover people of all ages, criminalizing essentially any public acknowledgment of LGBTQ+ life — in media, advertising, or online. Putin has since cited opposition to what he calls Western “gender perversions” as part of his stated justification for the invasion of Ukraine, now in its fourth year.

Other Russian LGBTQ+ organizations have taken a different path than dissolution: Parni+, a group of LGBTQ+ journalists and health educators also designated extremist this year, has continued operating from exile rather than shutting down. The Russian LGBT Network’s choice to end its work entirely, rather than continue underground or abroad, reflects how directly its model — providing direct legal and social support to people still living inside Russia — depended on being reachable by the people who needed it. That reachability is exactly what the extremist designation now makes too dangerous to sustain.

What it means going forward

For LGBTQ+ people still in Russia, the practical effect is the loss of one of the only organizations with the infrastructure to offer legal defense, psychological support, and emergency relocation help, including for people fleeing violence in Chechnya and other regions. Individual activists who built the Network’s regional chapters are expected to continue some version of that work quietly and independently, without the protection — or the visibility — of an organizational name.

The closure is also likely to accelerate what has already been a rising trend: LGBTQ+ Russians seeking asylum in the EU. Germany, Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the UK have all reported growing numbers of LGBTQ+ asylum claims from Russian nationals since 2023. Organizations like Rainbow Railroad and the Berlin-based Russian-speaking diaspora group Quarteera are increasingly the ones fielding requests that, until this month, might have gone to the Russian LGBT Network first.

Western governments have issued the standard condemnations — “deeply concerning,” a violation of international human rights obligations — without any enforcement mechanism attached. The Kremlin has shown no indication it expects, or fears, a response beyond words.