I’m not sure why non cishet liberals suddenly defend Ukraine.

That's fairly easy, the media has successfully pinkwashed Ukraine while constantly highlighting Russia's abysmal treatment of LGBT people. That Ukraine does not recognize the gender identity of most trans people and routinely drafts trans women into a military full of fascists, that over 80% of Ukrainians oppose gay marriage and that gay soldiers marry their partners' best friends so their partners at least would get to bury them if they die at the front, that queer people there are forced to fight for a state that shits on them, this is completely lost on most liberals. That Russia has made it illegal to be gay in public or that the province of Chechnia has actively placed honeypot accounts on gay dating sites to hunt down and murder its queer scene, OTOH, is not lost on them, as that gets more media coverage than Azovites assaulting gay bars in Ukraine or Zelensky making transphobic jokes on his tv show. The problem here is that while the pinkwashing of Ukraine is bs, the track record of Russia on LGBT rights is real. So if you want to battle the disinfo, it always comes off to libs as if you're downplaying our persecution in Russia. It's a highly successful propagandistic trap that falsely makes you come off as a reactionary homophobe when you question the state department line.

So while Ukraine and Russia are in reality both horridly queerphobic states gutted by neoliberalism and damaged by 30 years of anti-communist reactionary and religious rollback, and comparing them on LGBT rights is like trying to determine if the Tories or the GOP are more transphobic, while the only LGBT-friendly response to this war is to foster as much revolutionary defeatism as possible and offer asylum for queer people, especially deserters on both sites (which the EU's anti-Russian travel restrictions actively undermine, btw), that reality doesn't reach the average liberal at all.

And when you're queer yourself, this stuff just hits differently. We're constantly faced with the fact that large parts of this world want us dead, if we live in places like the US we're also under a constant threat of reactionary encroachment and stochastic terrorism, even in Europe being trans in public feels as if i got dropped off at the frontlines of the culture war just for the way i was born. And then we get to see how we're openly hunted in some parts of the world and when i'm being honest the way the left deals with queers is often kinda shitty and dismissive, too. Overall i think radical leftists are still my best option politically, but i see how somebody more propagandized than me would come to the false conclusion that western liberalism is the only self-preserving option for a queer person. It's a mistake, but it's one i find very easy to understand.