A group of Russian soldiers gone AWOL picked an unfortunate place to hide, reports out of Ukraine said Sunday afternoon.

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According to the reports, the soldiers hid in a basement in Kharkiv used by members of the city's LGBTQ community, only to be found by members of the community – who reportedly beat them and took them captive.

The Ukrainian LGBTQ community objects to the Russian government's persecution of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Russian citizens.

Viktor Pilipanko, a Ukrainian LGBTQ rights activist who alerted Israel Hayom to the story, said, "This is our war, the Ukrainians, but we have also been fighting as LGBTQ people, and I'm sure that the comrades in Kharkiv understood that.

"We are confronting a tyrannical, homophobic enemy," Pilipanko said.

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Workers at ZipRecruiter's Israeli R&D headquarters have organized a donation of laptops to LGBTQ youth who were kicked out of their homes and found shelter at Beit Dror and the Pink Roof.

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Beit Dror offers temporary accommodation to LGBTQ kids age 12-18, from all kinds of backgrounds, who are in crisis. The facility supplies their basic needs – clothing, a place to sleep, meals, and hot showers, as well as emotional support, counseling, and education.

The Pink Roof provides similar emergency accommodations to LGBTQ young adults age 18-25.

Developers Sefi Mintzer and Ephraim Berkovitch, who devote some of their free time to volunteering with the Otot NGO for youth at risk, saw the distress of the young people who were left without support from their families, and had no computers to use for schoolwork or for digital interaction.

Mintzer and Berkovitch prompted ZipRecruiter employees to clean out the R&D center's storage rooms, and gathered up the computers that had been replaced. They donated the computers no longer in use to the young people.

Meanwhile, ZipRecruiter employees took it upon themselves to teach a free introductory programming course to residents of Beit Dror, helping them take the first step on the path to becoming programmers.

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