Watchdog

BUCHAREST -- Romania is considering a bill that would ban minors from being exposed to so-called "gay propaganda" in schools and in public life, despite warnings from rights groups that it would "fuel Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns" and reinstate censorship in the former communist country.

Seven lawmakers from the ethnic Hungarian UDMR, a junior ruling coalition party, initiated the bill under the guise of preventing child abuse and promoting child rights. The Senate tacitly approved the bill on April 27 and parliament's lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, which has the final say, is due to vote this month.

The parliamentarians supporting the bill have said Romania was under threat from gender theories that have "taken Western Europe by storm" and are "endangering Christian values and the traditional Christian family."

But activists say the bill harms the very people it claims to want to protect.

"If censorship becomes acceptable in Romania, we will all suffer. If children's right to information and education can be censored in this brutal way, all youngsters will suffer," Teodora Ion-Rotaru, executive director of the LGBT advocacy group Accept, told RFE/RL.

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Similar legislation in neighboring Hungary that passed in June 2021 drew sharp criticism from the European Commission, which began legal steps against Budapest. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen called it a "shame."

Many in Romania share similar feelings of disgust and outrage.

"This is an absolutely inhumane draft law against a community that has the same rights as the majority," said Catalin Tenita, a lawmaker from the liberal Save Romania Union party and a member of the Human Rights Commission who voted against it.

"It is an illiberal policy following in the steps of [Hungarian Prime Minister] Viktor Orban," he said, claiming that the law would be "used as an instrument against the LGBT community, which will become a scapegoat…. [If] there are cases of pedophilia, [the law] will be used against them."

RFE/RL contacted the bill's co-initiator, Zakarias Zoltan, but at time of publication, the lawmaker had not responded. Botond Csoma, another lawmaker from UDMR, told RFE/RL that the bill wasn't specifically backed by the ethnic Hungarian party, although he declined to comment further.

Rights activists also say the proposed law is unconstitutional and could have wide-ranging effects.

"If a child is on the street and sees a Pride march, or if he or she sees a story about gay issues on television, or watches a film approved by the Romanian authorities that has LGBT issues," these would all be illegal under the law, Ion-Rotarau said.

"This kind of censorship affects our community, of course, but also it affects journalists, people in the advertising industry, medics, mental health experts…. LGBT people are everywhere," she added.

Activists worry that the bill, which amends a 2004 child protection law, is too vague and could be used by zealots to crack down on the LGBT community.

One article of the proposed law says that a child "has the right to be protected against the spreading of content through any means about the deviation from sex which is established at birth (by a doctor) or the popularization of sex change or homosexuality."

Octavian Cristea, an IT project manager from Bucharest who has an 8-month-old son, is also opposed.

"It is completely idiotic. I don't see any point in it. The LGBT community is part of our community. You can't wipe them out," he told RFE/RL. "For a European country in the 21st century, it's too much.

"It's like forbidding the color blue -- as if you can't tell children about blue. It's ridiculous."

Some activists and lawmakers have said that the proposed law is a weapon from the Russian propaganda arsenal.

"This level of [Russian] interference has been going on for six or seven years, fueling fears about the traditional family," Tenita said. "I can't prove the [ethnic Hungarian lawmakers] are on the Russian payroll, but their interests dovetail with Russian interests."

In 2013, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a law against the "propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations" among minors. As a result of the law, films and advertisements have been censored, activists targeted, and groups offering support to the LGBT community shut down. Russian rights activists and international watchdogs have said that the law has encouraged discrimination and abuse against Russia's LGBT community.

Hungary's Orban has had a close relationship with Putin in recent years. Orban's battles with the European Union have made the Hungarian prime minister a useful ally for Putin. The two leaders have found common ground on hot-button social and cultural issues such as the role of the media or LGBT rights.

While Orban has criticized Putin's attack on Ukraine, he has not backed energy sanctions on Russia and has refused to allow the delivery of arms to Ukraine via Hungary.

Florin Buhuceanu, the advocacy director of Accept, says the bill comes "in the context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which makes us become vulnerable. It's not the moment to mutilate laws which were adopted to protect rights."

"LGBT people face hostility. It is easy to deliberately use this instrument of hatred…in a society which is changing, but changing slowly," he said.

Despite the hostility -- often among the over-50s and from those in rural communities -- a 2018 referendum on amending the constitution with regards to same-sex marriage did not pass due to low turnout.

In Romania, marriage and civil partnerships for same-sex couples are already banned, but supporters of the referendum hoped that by changing the wording of the constitution to say that marriage could only be between a man and a woman rather than "partners," as it currently stands, they would prevent gay marriage from ever becoming enshrined in law.

Buhuceanu sees the bill currently being considered as a drive to weaken support for the types of values promoted by EU bodies.

"It's an anti-EU agenda, and I refer to all the legislative attempts to modify human rights laws. It is using children to attack…. It is the same type of illiberal philosophy which intends to break up ideas and values which we consider essential for Europe and for Romanian democracy."

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"Russian soft foreign policy has an agenda of promoting traditional family values through Central and Eastern Europe," Ion-Rotaru added. "It aims to polarize and stir up society that serves certain aims: to create an illiberal and authoritarian society. It also weakens the relationship between ordinary people and the government and creates distrust…and promotes ideas which run counter to the needs of Romanian society."

Socially conservative Romania decriminalized homosexuality in 2001, decades later than in some European Union countries. The last person to be imprisoned for being gay was released in 1998.

The Romanian Orthodox Church, which backed the 2018 referendum, and to which more than 85 percent of Romanians belong, is a driving force with its support for the "traditional" family.

Forty-four members of the European Parliament's LGBTI Intergroup on June 16 signed a letter to Romanian officials slamming the "shameful" bill and urging parliament's lower house to kill it.

"We view this bill as a particularly worrying development, given its resemblance to the Hungarian bill…and to the Russian 'anti-LGBTQ' propaganda law," the letter said.

The bill isn't even compliant with the Romanian Constitution, the signatories and activists argued, stating that it goes against articles that give civilians the right to equality and to access information without restriction.

They added: "It is not compliant with European human rights standards, does not seek to further extend protection, but rather to reverse already secured rights, and further seeks to ostracize LGBTIQ people by seeking to relegate them to the shadows."

But the bill doesn't just roll back rights, it marginalizes and discriminates against a community that has fought long and hard for small gains -- and is often met with vitriol.

An opinion poll carried out by the Avangarde pollster in 2021 found that only 12 percent of people in Romania thought that the LGBT community should have more rights, and 57 percent said they shouldn't. Sixty-two percent said that the role of the traditional family should be strengthened with a special law.

Another poll, taken in 2017 by the Pew Research Center, found that some 74 percent of Romanians were opposed to same-sex marriage, with 26 percent in favor. And in 2020, a poll carried out by the LGBT advocacy group Accept found that 53 percent of young transgender people had considered suicide at least once.

"We are treated like we don't have traditional values and the family doesn't count for us. But the family counts for us in the same way as it does for everyone else," Ion-Rotaru said.

RUSSKAYA LYAZHMAR, Russia -- The last time Maria Knyazeva saw her grandson, Private Vasily Knyazev, was when he visited over the New Year holiday, traveling from the Far Eastern region of Khabarovsk. That’s where he had been serving as a soldier in the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade.

“He had served under a contract three years ago,” Knyazeva, 70, told Idel.Realities as she planted potatoes in the yard of her house in a rural village. “His unit was from Khabarovsk. He came here from there.”

Knyazeva said she is not sure what her grandson is up to now. She said she didn’t know that he is, in all likelihood, among the tens of thousands of Russian soldiers who have been fighting in Ukraine in the biggest war in Europe in nearly eight decades.

She doesn’t know that he’s been implicated in war crimes that Ukrainian authorities, rights groups, and survivors say were committed by Russian military units against civilians in the districts north of Kyiv in March.

Now in its fifth month, Russia’s “special military operation” -- as the Kremlin insists on calling the war -- has shifted away from north-central Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces beat back an invasion force that had sought to seize the capital and topple the government.

In the wake of the withdrawal of Russian forces -- who pulled out of areas north of Kyiv and Chernihiv in late March and shifted east and south, to concentrate on seizing and holding territories there -- Ukrainian and international investigators have uncovered a trail of atrocities allegedly committed by Russian military units in the districts they had occupied: Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel, and others.

The bodies of at least 403 people who were killed by the Russian troops had been located and are being identified, Bucha’s mayor said on April 12.

While eyewitnesses have provided brutal first-hand accounts of civilians being summarily shot, in some cases executed with their hands tied behind their backs, investigators have also said they located a trove of computer files that were left at the temporary Russian military headquarters in Bucha when the soldiers retreated.

The files include a list of 1,600 soldiers from the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade who served in Bucha and nearby districts.

On April 28, Ukraine’s prosecutor-general, Iryna Venediktova, published a list of 10 names that she said had been identified as being members of the rifle brigade.

Agents from the Security Service of Ukraine, the country’s main intelligence agency, also said they had obtained a cell phone that had been left behind in the Bucha area by a Russian soldier from the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade.

The phone, according to the service, contained personal photographs that were then provided to a group of open-source researchers called InformNapalm.

InformNapalm later said it had identified the phone’s owner as a sergeant who served in a reconnaissance unit of the Khabarovsk-based rifle brigade.

From photographs and other data on the phone, the group compiled its own list of soldiers it said had served in the rifle brigade in Bucha.

Volga Soldiers

Using the lists complied by Ukrainian prosecutors and the open-source researchers, Idel.Realities, a project of RFE/RL’s Tatar-Bashkir Service, identified and sought to contact 11 soldiers who had served with the rifle brigade who were originally from Russia’s central Volga region. All were contacted initially using VK, the Russian social media giant, where they had profiles.

One man, identified on the lists as Aleksandr Koloyarov from the Saratov Oblast, told RFE/RL via a VK private message that he had served with the 64th brigade but had retired in 2018. His rank was unknown.

Another man, Viktor Loktionov, responded to RFE/RL via a VK message: "Send an article or at least a source so I can read what I'm talking about there, having nothing to do with it." He later stopped communicating.

Loktionov’s passport was issued in the Orenburg region, according to InformNapalm’s data. His rank was also unknown.

Another man who appeared on InformNapalm’s list was Aleksandr Yegorov. He denied he had ever served in the 64th Brigade.

Yet another name that appeared on the lists was Private Aleksei Shiyan. RFE/RL located his mother, Yelena Zakharova, who lives in the Urals region of Perm. She responded to questions about the Bucha events, replying via VK: “Who came up with this? This is some kind of nonsense.”

Shiyan had never been in Ukraine, she said.

“Everything is fine with my son. He has a family -- a wife, and their daughter is growing up,” she told RFE/RL before she then blocked a reporter from communicating further with her.

Vasya Knyazev From Mari-El

Private Knyazev, whose name appears on the list compiled by Ukrainian prosecutors, hails from the Mari-El region, a small, poor region on the Volga River about 800 kilometers east of Moscow.

On VK, Knyazev called himself Vasya -- a diminutive of his name. One of the photographs on the account -- dated January 20, 2021 -- contains precise coordinates where it was taken: the home base of military unit No. 51460 of the 64th Rifle Brigade.

In another photograph, posted on December 19, 2021, a young man believed to be Knyazev is shown in a dark down jacket and white sneakers next to a monument near the Kremlin in Moscow.

Knyazev did not respond to multiple messages sent to him via VK.

Passport data published by InformNapalm shows that Knyazev’s main ID document was issued in the village of Sernur in Mari-El. The birthdate given on the list compiled by InformNapalm and the birthdate listed on Knyazev’s VK account are the same.

RFE/RL contacted one of Knyazev’s friends listed on VK, a person named Pyotr Knyazev. The person replied that Vasily Knyazev had not served in the military since 2020.

According to Maria Knyazeva, Pyotr is Vasily’s brother.

Other information on Knyazev’s VK account indicated his hometown was Russkaya Lyazhmar, where he graduated from high school, though it was unclear when.

Knyazeva told RFE/RL that Knyazev’s mother had been killed several years ago, by his father.

RFE/RL did not speak to the father, who also lives with Knyazeva, and could not confirm that he killed his wife.

Another name identified by prosecutors was Mikhail Kashin, a 24-year-old from Votkinsk, a town in another central region, Udmurtia. Kashin, whose rank was unknown, did not respond to messages sent via VK seeking comment.

Contacted by RFE/RL, Kashin’s sister, Yekaterina Cherepanova, declined to discuss her brother’s military service:

“I don’t know anything about it at all,” she said via a VK message.

'Mass Heroism And Bravery'

The efforts of Ukrainian and international prosecutors have drawn support from United Nations and European Union officials, and from some of Ukraine’s biggest financial supporters.

During an unannounced visit to Kyiv this week, the top law enforcement official in the United States, Attorney General Merrick Garland, said he was appointing a veteran prosecutor with experience tracking former Nazis to help Ukraine in tracking Russian war criminals.

For Russia’s part, neither the Kremlin nor Russian commanders have made any public acknowledgment of the mounting evidence and allegations that Russian troops may have committed war crimes.

On April 19, President Vladimir Putin issued a decree lauding the work of the 64th Separate Guards Motor Rifle Brigade and praising it for “mass heroism and bravery, steadfastness, and fortitude” and for “distinguishing itself in military action for the protection of the Fatherland and state interests.”

Written by Mike Eckel based on reporting by RFE/RL’s Idel.Realities.