The group, North Caucasus (NC) SOS, wrote in a report that at least seven gay men had been blackmailed by security forces into volunteering for service and at least one had been killed.

NC SOS, a crisis group set up in 2021 to support Chechnya’s LGBT community, said in the report that in September 2022, even before Vladimir Putin announced a partial mobilization, six men were arrested on suspicion of being homosexual.

The men were threatened with trumped-up charges, the group alleges, and told they would be sent into pre-trial detention where their orientation would be made known to other inmates.

They were then reportedly given a choice between paying a ransom of $17,000 or ‘volunteering’ for service in Ukraine, where Chechen forces have been fighting alongside those of the Russian Federation, of which Chechnya is a federal republic.

“In the end, three of the detainees were forced to agree to volunteer, as the ransom amount was too much for their families," NC SOS wrote on its website.

Following the arrests in 2022, law-enforcement raids and detentions continued, with four more gay men being coerced into military service the following year, the group’s report states, adding that the men’s fates remain unknown.