It was a windy afternoon and Anfisa Glushenko, a 23-year-old volunteer from the self-defense forces of the Luhansk People’s Republic, was in a chatty mood. As the car sped past the charred gas stations and abandoned villages of eastern Ukraine, she kept her green eyes focused on the road and her manicured red nails folded on her camouflage trousers. “I can’t remember the last time I wore a dress,” she said proudly as we drove from her native Luhansk to Donetsk, another rebel-held city in Ukraine’s east.

It was April 2015. The fighting between the Ukrainian government and Russian-backed rebels that had wrought so much destruction in the east of the country had quieted down, but for Anfisa the war was far from over. When the conflict erupted in the spring of 2014, she had been a student in Kiev. She used to dream of traveling the world and on occasion even joined her friends at pro-European demonstrations in Kiev’s Maidan Square. Then, shortly after Russian President Vladimir Putin annexed Crimea and pro-Russian demonstrators came out across the east, Anfisa visited her family in the east’s industrial heartlands. Everything changed.

“When I came back home and saw what was happening here it felt like a fog had lifted in my head. I know we are on the right path and now I know there is an alternative to all the crap that the West is feeding us,” she said.

What kind of Western crap? Anfisa didn’t blink: “Gay marriage.” Homosexuality, in her view, was a byproduct of Western liberalism, a sign that the West had lost its way.