“If I die, I’ll die as a gay man. And if I survive, I won’t hide it anymore.”
This was how Oleksandr Demenko came out to his mother. It was spring 2022, and the soldier, now aged 26, was fighting to defend the Azovstal plant in Mariupol. Russian troops were close to capturing the steel plant, and communications were about to go down. Determined not to die without telling his mother who he really was, Demenko used those final moments of contact with the outside world to call her and speak his truth.
Then, the phones were cut off. Russia seized the plant and occupied the city of Mariupol. Demenko was held captive as one of the Azovstal Defenders for 20 months, a gay prisoner of war of a regime that has banned the “LGBT movement”, labelling it “extremist”.
