In late , parliament unanimously approved a media regulation bill that banned hate speech and incitement based on sexual orientation or gender identity. In March , a parliamentary bill was introduced for civil unions. While in the countries of Western Europe homosexuality was punishable by death via burning , the legislatures of the Kievan Rus and in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was much softer; there is no known individual case of execution for one's sexuality.
The maximum punishment in the Principality of Kiev and in the Kingdom of GaliciaβVolhynia was church fasting , excommunication, prayer, and mandatory repentance. The Zaporozhian Sich considered homosexuality unchristian and demonic; Cossacks caught in contact with people of the same sex were trampled into the ground by horses. Given that in centuries most of the territories inhabited by Ukrainians were under the control of different states, different laws were in force in the respective territories.
In western Ukraine, which was then part of PolishβLithuanian Commonwealth , gays were mostly beheaded and publicly hanged , in the east Hetmanate , which was then under the protectorate of Russia , they were impaled or sent to hard labor in Siberia , and in the south, which was then under the rule of the Crimean Khanate and the Ottoman Empire , gays were brutally killed or castrated.
In Ukrainian villages in the 19th century, group masturbation became widely popular among teenagers, including homosexuals. After the February Revolution and the Ukrainian People's Republic UPR gaining autonomy in and declaring independence in , all laws of the Russian Empire were repealed, including the article punishing homosexuality. During the time of the UPR, homosexual relations were legal, but the situation of this population group was not publicly discussed by the politicians of that time due to the War of Independence.
But after Stalin 's rise in later s and Genrikh Yagoda 's message accusing homosexuals of "espionage", homosexuality was criminalized in as part of Stalin's repressions; the corresponding article was introduced into the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR in , and was more often applied to political opponents and dissidents. Later, lawyers and doctors in the USSR also reasoned about homosexuality as a manifestation of "moral decay. During the German occupation of Ukraine in , according to official data, the Nazis murdered more than 10, homosexuals, some of whom were sent to Nazi concentration camps.
