It was 2:02 am in Orlando, Florida when a gunman broke into the Pulse nightclub and opened fire, killing forty-nine people in the worst mass shooting in American history. At the very same time, 7 time zones away in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, small groups of men in black clothes began circling the center of the city. They were members of ultra-nationalist, far-right organizations and their targets, like that of the Florida shooter, were LGBTQ people. Hundreds of gay rights activists were about to march through central Kiev and a right-wing spokesman had threatened to turn the event into “a bloodbath.”

The June 12, 2016, march in Kiev passed peacefully, but the security arrangements that it entailed came as a reminder that from the United States to Ukraine, from Iraq to Bangladesh and Russia, LGBTQ people are a target. Islamic fundamentalists, Christian Orthodox activists or far-right nationalist groups and other radical movements are choosing homosexuality as a top enemy symbolizing what they see as a “decadent” West.

This trend has put gay rights not only on the frontline in the battle for human rights; civic expression of the LGBTQ community’s existence has become engulfed in geopolitics.

In Ukraine, this has deeply entangled LGBTQ lives in a complex war with Russia. Powerful, Kremlin-funded propaganda is tapping into the existing homophobia in Ukraine’s socially conservative society to cast sexual minorities as a Western creation. Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine often cite homosexuality (or “homofascism”) as one of the primary reasons they took up arms against the government in Kiev.