St. Petersburg Court Declares the Russian LGBT Network “Extremist”

St. Petersburg City Court has declared the Russian LGBT Network an “extremist” organisation and banned it from operating in the country. As Reuters reports , the ruling was issued on April 27 in response to a Justice Ministry lawsuit. What matters here is not only the ban itself: in Russia, such a designation can open the way to criminal cases against people the authorities say are linked to the group.

The Russian LGBT Network was founded in 2006 and long remained the country’s largest federal-level LGBT rights organisation. It became especially well known for helping evacuate gay men from Chechnya during years of arrests, torture, and so-called “honour killings” in the region. According to publicly available information, the network had at least 17 branches across the country.

Pressure on the organisation had been building for years. In 2021, the authorities added the Russian LGBT Network, its lawyer Ivan Pavlov, and several of his former colleagues to the “foreign agents” register. In 2022, anti-LGBT legislation forced the closure of Sfera, the network’s umbrella foundation, though it later resumed work.

The new ruling fits into a broader campaign that accelerated after Russia’s Supreme Court labelled the so-called “international LGBT public movement” “extremist” in November 2023. Since then, Russian courts have moved one by one against specific LGBT initiatives. In March 2026, the group Coming Out was banned, and in April similar rulings followed against Irida, Parni+, and the Moscow Community Center for LGBT+ Initiatives.

That makes the new ban especially significant: this is no longer a local initiative but an organisation that coordinated support for LGBT people across the country for many years. In that sense, the ruling can be seen as another step toward making almost any legal and public LGBT rights work inside Russia impossible.