A court in Orel has designated the Russian media website Parni Plus, which covers issues affecting the LGBTQ+ community, as an “extremist organization.” According to the website’s editorial team, the court ruling states that the project has already been “liquidated by court order in connection with carrying out extremist activities.” In a statement, the site wrote: “Of course, we are not going anywhere — no matter how much the Russian authorities might want that.”
The case file includes an expert opinion that cites materials published on the site as evidence of its “extremist” activity: articles about queer people and LGBT families in Russian regions, discrimination monitoring data, and a webinar featuring a psychologist and a lawyer discussing the law banning “LGBT propaganda.”
As Parni Plus journalist Vadim Vaganov told The Insider, the editorial team does not plan to cease operations, but going forward it will take security even more seriously, both for contributors living in Russia and for its audience.
“This news did not come as a surprise. Our media outlet has long irritated the authorities. We have not gone underground; we have not stopped publishing; we never stopped speaking with our audience; and we are still helping people — despite the long period of pressure on us. Both the outlet itself and individual team members have already been designated ‘foreign agents.’ In the past year alone, our team has been fined more than two million rubles [$26,500]. I personally have already received six fines for so-called [LGBT] propaganda.
As you can see, the pressure has not stopped us, and I believe this fact particularly irritates the state. So they have decided to move to the next step: to label us ‘extremists.’ The risks are greater, of course. But LGBTQ+ people are still in need of information and our support. In a situation like this, this need only becomes more acute. So we will certainly continue our work. The main question for us now is how to carry on our activities in a way that ensures our audience's safety.
We have contributors in Russia, and this cooperation is very important to us. We understand the risks involved and have long been working with different pressure scenarios in mind. We have security protocols in place, we try to take into account all possible designations and consequences, and now, of course, we will be even more careful in how we organize this work going forward.”
Parni Plus editor-in-chief Yevgeny Pisemsky added that repression in Russia operates “like an endless meat grinder”:
“Their goal is not just to punish, but to wear you down to the point where you don’t even have the strength to draw a breath. Since 2020, our LGBTQ+ media outlet has been living through an endless sequence of court hearings, police reports, and appeals… This is a meticulously coordinated attempt to force us into silence, to turn us into faceless shadows, to erase the very possibility of being open. But we will not shut down now. Even under the weight of fines and amid an acute funding crisis, we remain one of the few media outlets that continues to work for LGBTQ+ people in Russia, refusing to pretend that they do not exist. Being labeled extremists did not come as a surprise to us — we prepared thoroughly, and those for whom it was dangerous to stay in Russia have left.”
In November 2023, Russia’s Supreme Court declared the non-existent “international LGBT movement” to be extremist. In April 2025, for the first time, the Ministry of Justice named a specific individual whom the Russian authorities consider to be a member of this “movement”: Parni Plus journalist Vadim Vaganov.
