Full legal context
Russia scores 2.00 % on the Rainbow Map, the lowest figure of any country on this site, and six of its seven categories are a flat zero. The exception is family, at 11 %, and it measures the bare existence of a legal idea of cohabitation rather than anything a couple can use.
Sex between men has not been a crime since 1993. Everything else about being gay in public has been made one in stages, and the decisive step was taken by a court rather than by parliament: in November 2023 the Supreme Court declared an organisation that does not exist to be extremist. That construction is what makes the rest work. There is no membership list for the "international LGBT public movement", so belonging to it is whatever a prosecutor says it is.
Here is the historical overview of the legalisation of homosexuality and gay rights in Russia.
Phase I: Decriminalised and Left Alone (1993 to 2012)
1993: Article 121 of the criminal code is repealed, as a condition of joining the Council of Europe. Sex between women had never been criminalised.
The twenty years that follow bring no anti-discrimination law, no partnership, no hate crime provision. A visible scene grows in Moscow and St Petersburg regardless, and for a while it is one of the largest in eastern Europe.
Phase II: Propaganda (2013 to 2022)
2013: The federal law prohibiting propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors is signed in June. In 2017 the European Court of Human Rights finds it in breach of the Convention in Bayev and Others v. Russia. It stays.
2020: A constitutional amendment defines marriage as a union of a man and a woman.
2022: In December the propaganda law is extended to every audience regardless of age, and to any material said to promote gender transition. A novel, a film or a post is enough.
Phase III: The Extremism Ruling (2023)
2023: In July a law bans gender-affirming medical care and legal gender recognition outright, annuls existing marriages in which a partner has transitioned, and bars trans people from adoption and guardianship.
2023: On 30 November the Supreme Court, sitting in closed session on a suit brought by the Justice Ministry, declares the international LGBT public movement an extremist organisation. No such organisation exists and no defendant was heard. Police raided clubs in Moscow, St Petersburg and Orenburg within days.
Phase IV: What Followed (2024 to 2026)
2024: The first convictions arrive in February. A man in Volgograd region is convicted of displaying the symbols of an extremist organisation for posting a picture of a rainbow flag. A woman in Nizhny Novgorod is given five days of administrative detention for wearing rainbow earrings.
2025: Between January 2024 and June 2025 at least twenty people face criminal charges over alleged participation in the movement, and one of them dies by suicide in pretrial detention. In May, staff of two publishing houses are charged with running an extremist organisation for selling novels with gay characters.
2026: Between March and May nine organisations are designated extremist, among them the Russian LGBT Network, the oldest and largest in the country. Amnesty International called it an escalation rather than a new policy, which is the accurate reading: the mechanism was built in 2023 and has been used since.
Chechnya is a separate matter and has been since 2017. Men presumed to be gay have been disappeared, detained and tortured there, documented by journalists, human rights organisations and survivors who reached asylum abroad. Nobody has been prosecuted for it.
