Signing up for the war, members of Ukraine’s LGBTQ community have begun sewing the picture of the fabled beast immediately below the national flag into their uniforms.

As volunteer fighters Oleksandr Zhuhan and Antonina Romanova prepare to return to active service, they ponder the unicorn insignia on their uniform, a symbol of their position as an LGBTQ couple serving in the Ukrainian army.

Signing up for the war, members of Ukraine’s LGBTQ community have begun stitching the picture of the fabled beast into their standard-issue epaulettes, directly below the national flag. As he and Romanova dressed in their apartment for their second three-month combat cycle, Zhuhan told Reuters that the practise dates back to the 2014 conflict, when Russia invaded and annexed the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine, “when a lot of people declared there are no homosexual people in the army.”