Anna Kosvinitseva is a web designer in the southern Russian city of Astrakhan who has been working mostly from home for the past few years. She says she has experienced numerous unpleasant encounters because of her sexual orientation and now ventures out in public as rarely as possible. Like many in Russia’s LGBT community, Kosvinitseva is worried about a new initiative wending its way through the State Duma, the lower chamber of parliament, that would make the country’s 2013 law against distributing information about so-called nontraditional lifestyles among minors significantly harsher. “Most likely, a mass migration of sexual minorities out of the country will begin,” she said when asked what would happen if the harsher law is adopted. “In fact, our safety and our opportunities to leave the country at all might be in jeopardy. After all, we can’t expect help from anyone. We are quite simply being forbidden to love and be loved.”