2025 marked a new stage of pressure on queer people in Russia. Restrictions affected personal social media pages, dating sites, media outlets, online platforms, publishers, and cultural projects. Novaya-Europe, which reviewed more than 50 court rulings from 2025, writes that by the end of the year public expression of queer identity had in effect been banned.
Courts in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Tula, Ulyanovsk, Oryol, Volgograd, Perm, Samara, Saratov, Voronezh, Chelyabinsk, Sevastopol, and Tatarstan fined people over rainbow flag images and statements interpreted as “propaganda” or displays of “extremist symbols.” In most cases, penalties were 1,000 to 2,000 rubles plus mandatory deletion of the content.
On March 10, 2025, the Uzlovsky District Court in the Tula Region fined a local resident 1,800 rubles for posting a photo of a rainbow flag on social media. In March, a court in Komsomolsk-on-Amur fined a woman 1,000 rubles for using a rainbow image in her Tabor.ru dating profile. A repeat episode can already trigger criminal prosecution under Article 282.4 of the Criminal Code, which carries up to four years in prison.
According to Human Rights Watch, from January 2024 to June 2025 at least 81 people were found guilty under Article 20.3 of the administrative code for publishing LGBT symbols. In many cases, people were punished for old posts from 2019 to 2021 that remained publicly accessible after the ban; courts treated that as a continuing offense.
The crackdown extended beyond private users. At least 20 people faced criminal cases under Article 282.2 of the Criminal Code over alleged ties to the “LGBT movement.” The authors describe the case of Andrey Kotov, owner of the Men Travel agency, as one of the gravest episodes: he was found dead in Moscow’s Vodnik pretrial detention center in late December 2024, and in 2025 a court found him guilty posthumously.
Censorship also intensified. Under regulatory pressure, platforms and online cinemas removed or edited scenes involving queer characters; a “propaganda” case was also opened against Apple over a series on Apple TV+. In November 2025, Roskomnadzor said it had identified about 100 films with LGBT themes on Russian audiovisual platforms and ordered providers to eliminate the violations.