Ukraine’s former deputy culture minister has proposed legalizing same-sex civil partnerships, arguing that it would both reward LGBTQ soldiers’ service and please Kiev’s foreign backers. On Tuesday, Inna Sovsun of the Golos party announced that the bill had been submitted to the Verkhovna Rada for consideration.
“Legalization of single-sex relationships is very important to me now, because if I come home [dead], my partner can’t even bury me,” Sovsun said in announcing her bill, citing one of the arguments from the Ukrainian LGBT Soldiers and Allies Facebook community.
The bill is the result of nine months of collaboration between two non-governmental organizations. Sovsun argued that it would create legal grounds for people in same-sex relationships to regulate property ownership, inheritance, pensions, and death benefits.
“I could say that this is what our Western allies are demanding of us – and it is true, they are,” she wrote, but 56% of Ukrainians agree that LGBTQ people should be allowed to marry. “We have matured as a society beyond the ‘Russian swamp’ and Soviet worldview.”
Ukrainians are “simply a different biological species” than Russians because they value “human dignity and freedom,” she concluded.
While Sovsun did not cite her sources, the percentage corresponds to a 2017 online survey commissioned by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA).
Although homosexuality was decriminalized in Ukraine in 1991, the country’s constitution defines marriage as a voluntary union between a man and a woman (Article 51). As late as 2018, the Justice Ministry in Kiev argued there were no legal grounds for same-sex civil partnerships.
Sovsun is a member of Golos, a “liberal” and “pro-European” party that backs President Vladimir Zelensky’s ruling majority. They won 20 seats out of 450 in the 2019 election, but 11 MPs have since left to form their own party, dubbed “Justice.” Sovsun was deputy minister of science and education between 2014 and 2016, following the US-backed coup in Kiev, when the government’s decision to restrict the use of Russian language contributed to the Donbass unrest.
