Belarus passes a law modelled on Russia’s anti-LGBTQ+ architecture. The template is familiar. The consequences will be local, intimate, and exact.
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The police came for Andrei and Sasha at home. Andrei was twenty; both were students, both living in Minsk. According to testimony gathered by the Associated Press, what followed was a beating carried out with forensic patience. Their heads were slammed into a door frame and their phones seized and unlocked. The officers wanted names: ‘gays in Minsk and Moscow.’ The demand itself, reaching across two capitals and two states, revealed something more than local cruelty. The Belarusian security apparatus was not improvising.
On 2 April 2026, the Council of the Republic, the upper chamber of the Belarusian parliament, gave final approval to legislation that makes the ‘propaganda of homosexual relations, gender change, refusal to have children and paedophilia’ punishable by fines, community labour and up to fifteen days’ administrative detention. The lower house had passed the bill in March. It now awaits the signature of President Alexander Lukashenko, which is a formality in a country where parliament functions as a rubber stamp and where Lukashenko has governed for over three decades without meaningful opposition. The bill was initiated by Prosecutor General Andrei Shved, who announced the draft legislation in February 2024 by declaring that its opponents were ‘trying to destroy traditional family values, and therefore morality and statehood.’ He warned that it would be necessary to ‘prevent even discussion’ of the subject.
Look at what the bill yokes together. Homosexuality, gender transition, voluntary childlessness and paedophilia are compressed into a single administrative article, Article 19.16 of the Code on Administrative Violations. Four unrelated phenomena in one legal category. This is not confusion. It is a technique. By placing queer identity alongside the sexual abuse of children in the same sentence, the law constructs a rhetorical equation that no amount of legal scholarship will easily dislodge from the public mind.
The technique is borrowed. Russia adopted its first ‘gay propaganda’ law in 2013, initially restricting only the depiction of same-sex relationships to minors. In December 2022, months after the Ukrainian counteroffensive had humiliated the Kremlin and a partial mobilisation had rattled Russian society, the Duma extended the prohibition to adults. Seven months later, in July 2023, Russia banned gender transition entirely. Then, on 30 November 2023, in a closed hearing lasting four hours, the Supreme Court designated the ‘international LGBT movement’ as an extremist organisation. The progression took a decade. By 2024, according to Human Rights Watch, Russian courts had imposed 257 ‘gay propaganda’ penalties in two years alone, compared with 22 in the previous two. At least twenty people faced criminal charges. One died by suicide in pretrial detention. In May 2025, three employees of two publishing houses were charged with ‘running an extremist organisation’ for the offence of selling fiction that explored queer themes. The escalation was baked into the design of the legislation from the start.
Belarus is not merely imitating Russia. It is importing the same architecture wholesale, on a compressed timeline: what took Moscow ten years, Minsk accomplished in roughly two. Natalya Kochanova, the speaker of the upper chamber and one of Lukashenko’s closest political allies, said as much: ‘We will also need to take similar measures.’ She did not appear to regard the admission as embarrassing.
Lukashenko’s personal convictions on the subject are well documented. In 2012, responding to Guido Westerwelle, then Germany’s openly gay foreign minister, who had branded Lukashenko ‘Europe’s last dictator’, he offered a remark that entered the lexicon of European authoritarianism: ‘It’s better to be a dictator than gay.’ He later called gay men ‘perverts’ and ‘the ultimate abomination.’ These were not slips. They were signals to Moscow, to the Orthodox establishment and to a domestic audience that understood what the regime expected of them in return for stability.
Belarus had decriminalised homosexuality in 1994, four months before Lukashenko came to power. The first attempt to hold a Pride event anywhere in the former Soviet Union occurred in Minsk in 1999. Belarusians have long cited tolerance as a defining feature of their national character. The law passed this spring does not reflect a settled national consensus so much as a regime casting about for enemies it can afford to make.
That calculus sharpened after August 2020. Hundreds of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets to protest a rigged presidential election. It was the largest sustained popular uprising in the country’s post-Soviet history. On 5 September 2020, for the first time, LGBTQ+ activists appeared with rainbow flags at a women’s march in Minsk, walking alongside the white-red-white opposition banners. ‘LGBT people are calling for freedom,’ one of the flag bearers, Anna Bredova, told the Associated Press. ‘We are tired of living in a dictatorship where we simply didn’t exist.’ The crackdown that followed was total: some 65,000 arrests over the next four years, and, as of late March 2026, more than 900 political prisoners were still behind bars according to the Viasna Human Rights Centre. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ales Bialiatski, founder of Viasna and himself a prisoner for over four years, was released only in December 2025 as part of a US-brokered sanctions deal; his passport was cancelled by Minsk days ago. The queer community was never going to be exempt from this machinery.
The bill’s practical consequences are already visible. TG House, a Belarusian organisation advocating for transgender rights, has documented at least twelve cases of persecution of LGBTQ+ people in the three months preceding the bill’s passage. One of those cases was a police raid on a Minsk nightclub during a private gay party in March 2026. The country’s security service, still operating under its Soviet-era name, the KGB, has, according to rights defenders, blackmailed queer Belarusians by threatening to expose their sexual orientation unless they cooperated with the agency.
Alisa Sarmant, who heads TG House, has articulated the bill’s effect with a precision the legislation’s own authors would not permit in public. Queer people had faced beatings, arrests and mockery before, she said, ‘but now law enforcement agencies have received legal grounds for repression.’ The distinction matters. What was extralegal is now statutory. Sarmant also pointed to a less visible threat: transgender people may be denied permission to purchase the medicines their transitions require. Gender transition remains technically legal in Belarus, governed by a Ministry of Health commission, but the approval rate has collapsed from 80 per cent to 20 per cent in recent years, and the new law’s vaguely worded prohibition on ‘propaganda’ of gender change could be used to criminalise the very counselling centres that inform patients of their rights. TG House says it has received hundreds of requests for psychological help and assistance with emigration since the bill’s passage.
The word ‘propaganda’ does most of the law’s heavy lifting. Belarusian jurisprudence defines ‘dissemination of information’ as any communication directed at an unspecified number of people, regardless of format. A photograph posted to social media, a pamphlet distributed by an NGO, a public mention of a same-sex relationship: all could fall within the scope of Article 19.16. As the Belarusian Helsinki Committee has observed, the term ‘attractiveness’, central to the article’s formulation, has no strict legal definition and invites arbitrary interpretation. The law is designed to be elastic. Its purpose is not to prosecute specific acts but to produce a general atmosphere of fear in which self-censorship becomes the rational response to an irrational legal framework.
In Russia, the results of that atmosphere are measurable. A 2024 survey conducted by the organisations Sphere and Coming Out found that 82 per cent of Russian LGBTQ+ respondents perceived personal risks following the Supreme Court’s extremism ruling, and 88 per cent said they had been affected by the government’s censorship. People deleted their own social media histories, posts about sexual health, links to support hotlines, and photographs in an effort to remove anything that might retroactively qualify as evidence. Some of the content that triggered prosecutions had been published as far back as a decade before the extremism designation.
Belarus is now entering the same corridor. The bill’s supporters call it a defence of values. Its opponents call it a carbon copy. Both descriptions are accurate, but neither is sufficient. What the legislation amounts to, in the clearest terms, is the codification of a persecution that was already underway: a legal veneer applied over bruises that already existed.
In a photograph taken on 6 September 2020, LGBTQ+ activists are shown performing with rainbow flags in front of a police barricade during the opposition protests in Minsk. Beside them flutters the old Belarusian national flag, the white-red-white banner that the regime has since banned. Both flags, the rainbow and national, belonged to the same gesture of refusal. Six years later, either one could get you arrested.
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