President Obama will meet with several LGBT groups during his trip later this week to St. Petersburg, a move likely to ruffle Russian President Vladimir Putin after the recent passage of a series of anti-gay laws.

The president will meet with human rights activists Lev Ponomarev and Lyudmila Alexeyeva, legal aid NGO director Pavel Chikov, and Coming Out, a St. Petersburg-based LGBT organization, according to a report in BuzzFeed.

The decision to meet with the activists in not unprecedented — Obama also met with human rights leaders in 2009 — but comes amid a period of heightened tension with the Kremlin.