Ahead of Ukraine’s presidential elections, the problems of the country’s LGBT community are being ignored by our leading politicians. None of the leading candidates’ programmes even mention LGBT rights or address the issue directly, without vague euphemisms.

Instead of fighting for gay and lesbian rights, Ukraine’s presidential candidates continue to fight for their ratings by promoting populist ideas, rather than the ones that Ukrainian society needs The idea of introducing same-sex marriage is still not accepted in Ukraine, and the majority of the population do not understand what the term “civil partnership” means.

At Donbas News, our recent survey on the streets of the cities of Mariupol and Slovyansk proved this fact. We asked people the following two questions immediately after one another: 1) Do you support the introduction of civil partnerships? 2) Do you support the introduction of same-sex marriage? The first question received more positive responses, whereas the second tended to provoke dismay. For some respondents, it was embarrassing even to answer the question, let alone thinking about supporting the idea politically.

These kind of reactions aren’t particularly surprising. After all, presidential candidates freely declare their homophobia. Indeed, they are the ones saturating Ukrainian society with their arguments about LGBT rights - the most famous one being, for example, “this is not the right time to think about this”.