The Supreme Court of Ukraine officially recognised the “de facto” marriage of LGBT activists Zoryan Kis and Tymur Levchuk in a decision on 25 February, the Ukrainian human rights organisation Insight LGBTQ announced on Monday.
The couple had previously been recognised as a family by a Kyiv district court in June, and the Supreme Court upheld that decision in the face of an appeal against it brought by conservative movement Vsi Razom (All Together). The ruling is the first of its kind in Ukraine, where, according to the country’s 1996 constitution, marriage can only be between two members of the opposite sex.
The court process was triggered by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry’s 2024 refusal to acknowledge Levchuk as Kis’s family member, denying him the right to accompany Kis on a diplomatic posting to Israel.
Lawyers for Levchuk and Kis successfully argued that as the couple had lived together since 2013, had been married in an unofficial ceremony in Ukraine in 2016, and had officially registered their marriage in the US in 2021, they should be recognised as a family under Ukrainian law.
Calling the Supreme Court’s ruling “a tremendous precedent”, Insight LGBTQ said that the decision would prevent any “homophobic or conservative organisation” from using the courts “as a tool to persecute or overturn decisions in favor of LGBT+ people under the guise of ‘social morality.’”
Ukraine’s current roadmap for joining the European Union, which was agreed in May, includes a commitment for Kyiv to provide greater recognition and protection for same-sex couples as a prerequisite for its accession to the bloc.
However, Ukrainian rights organisations warned in February that a new draft of the country’s revised Civil Code threatened to nullify the “de facto” recognition obtained by Kis and Levchuk, and provided no alternative pathway for same-sex relationships to be recognised, in contravention of Ukraine’s EU accession requirements.
A proposed law to allow civil unions for Ukrainian same-sex couples introduced in 2023 has been stalled in Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada for the past three years due to a lack of necessary approval from the Legal Policy Committee.
