Photos have been released after Insight – a community centre that has become a lifeline for LGBTQ+ Ukrainians – was broken into and vandalised this week.
Since February 2022, Insight, a feminist organisation that provides medical care, legal aid, and psychosocial services to queer community members, has housed hundreds of people in three emergency shelters and distributed more than 25,000 emergency aid parcels.
Insight’s human rights campaigners have long been targeted for their work. In April 2022, two unidentified assailants teargassed Insight chair Olena Shevchenko on the streets of Lviv while she was delivering humanitarian aid. This followed an attack on the Equality Festival 2016 in Lviv, LGBTQ+ campaigners being teargassed at Kyiv Pride in 2018, and two attackers physically beating Shevchenko in 2019 while shouting slurs at her.