A One-Year Recap!

It’s been at least one year since I’ve started this blog so I think it appropriate to dedicate this post to recap this blog’s success with a small but growing fan base.

My most popular post this past year according to my stats was one that I wrote recently.  Sudden Divorce Syndrome and the Decembrist Wives discussed contrasts between married American women of today and Married Russian women of privilege in the past.  This post hit a deeper cord than I had expected up until this point and let me know that there are some people paying attention to this blog.  It inspired a couple of bloggers to repost it, had several likes and several comments.

In a close second in popularity was my post, British Expats Chime In About American Women. The spoiled entitled princess attitude of western women is well documented and understood among western men, but American women seem to occupy a category all their own if even the British men are tired of them.  This article got a ton of views including views and links from the pick up artist (PUA) community.

My article The Skinny About Russian Women (RW) and American Women (AW) takes the bronze for this past year according to the number of views.  It is a simple comparison of how obesity, and hence attractiveness, differ between AW and RW and how Americans seem to keep trying to redefine “a few extra pounds” as the new beauty standard.  The only problem is that beauty standards aren’t really driven by social consensus.  There are many objective measures, including a healthy BMI, that seem more prevalent in Russian women than in American women in regards to beauty.  But this trend may be changing.

It seems that articles I’ve written that cast AW in a negative light seem to get the most views.  This is hardly surprising to me.  Daytime talk shows and the new media seem dominated by women’s issues, who’s whole purpose is to, as Bill Maher would say, make women nod.  This fact didn’t really occur to me until the NFL recently made their football players wear pink to raise awareness for breast cancer during football games. Huh?  First of all, the NFL is the most successful sports organization on the planet with the Superbowl being the most watched sporting event every year.  So they aren’t really hurting for ratings. Second, I can’t think of a disease that has any more awareness in the public mind than breast cancer. So what’s the point?  Do men have a single western institution left for themselves that hasn’t been invaded by feminist concerns? So men have taken to a discussion of issues that concern them to the internet where they seem to have found a willing audience.

In part, this is because of simple demographics.  There are simply more women watching television during the day time and reading certain magazines and books than men so their interests is what the producers cater to.  It’s ratings you need to sell the advertising.  I get that.  But is there content that can indoctrinate women about how to be better wives and girlfriends? No?  Is there programming that chastises women for ruining a man’s life in divorce court? No? Then we can consider the well sufficiently poisened against male interests.

So it’s no wonder that articles like my top three get more views on my blog.  And I haven’t been around long.  I started this blog just to pass the time until my next trip overseas.  I took a new job recently, and as a result, I couldn’t take vacation until now.  So I started this blog to share some of my experiences and impart some knowledge to other men who are thinking about a foreign bride in the mean time.  You have a serious problem, ladies, because the thing is, trashing American women wasn’t really my focus.  I have a bunch of other content to try and share some experiences and educate men on how to look for a wife overseas, but they don’t nearly get as many page views.  The articles I write that criticize the American woman were to provide some contextual information and yet they get more hits than all my other articles combined.  Very telling, isn’t it?

Ukraine Watch: Donetsk’s Last Stand?

It’s been a while since I’ve written an article about the potentially unstable conditions in Ukraine’s eastern territories that might threaten a Western man’s bride search in that country.  Judging by some replies from marriage agencies in Ukraine, life seems to be proceeding normally despite some escalation in violence as the provisional government was trying to establish order in regions that supposedly voted for succession from Ukraine.

My read on the situation was that May 25th, the day that Ukraine was to elect their new president, would be the milestone that determines how this latest crisis in the FSU would play out.  Despite global news coverage, it seems like the world was holding its breath while government leaders around the world hastily formulated strategies to be implemented based on the outcome of Ukraine’s election.

Then something interesting happened.

Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine, took action by mobilizing his employees to work with the police in confronting the rebels in Mariupol and Donetsk.  That, in itself, is something you don’t see everyday.  What makes this turn of events even more remarkable is that Akhmetov seemed to be more effective at quelling the rebellion than the Ukrainian military!

With elections still to come, Akhmetov’s actions indicated to me that most Ukrainians in the east of the country favored a unified Ukraine.  I doubt that a rational player such as Akhmetov wouldn’t have done what he did if he wasn’t certain that public opinion was on his side.  Plus, this would make it far more difficult for President Vladimir Putin of Russia to rationalize that this latest development was the result of meddling from “western fascists”. Putin’s propaganda machine likely suffered a significant setback as well as making any sort of overt Russian military action in Ukraine unfeasible.  How can Putin justify “saving” Russian speakers in Ukraine that don’t want to be saved while the whole world is watching?  Putin was already softening his stance by suggesting that he would abide by the election results.  It wasn’t long after Akhmetov’s civil activism that Putin withdrew the forces that he deployed along Russia’s border with Ukraine.

Well, the final nail was driven in on May 25th when Petro Poroshenko won an open and transparent presidential election by such a large margin, that it wouldn’t have mattered if the separated regions voted or not.  Poroshenko is being portrayed as a pragmatic man who campaigned on closer ties with Europe while trying to mend the political rift with Russia.  So his victory is as clear a mandate by the people as anyone can hope for, and he has started to hit the separatists hard to bring Donetsk back into Ukraine where it belongs.

Whatever hope Putin had of acquiring new territory or influencing autonomous regions in Ukraine vanished on May 25th.  This isn’t a defeat for him by any means.  He seized Crimea and recently signed an energy deal with China, so he can at least call this a win.

It’s hard to know what is going on in Putin’s mind.  He most certainly wants to reconstitute the Soviet Union or Russian Empire in some way.  It’s not a matter of if he tries again, but when and where.  He most certainly knows by now that any overt attempts to do so in Eastern Europe will only push those countries further into NATO or the EU’s sphere of influence.  If he wants influence there again, it will cost him time and money and Russia doesn’t really have much of either.  He might decide to move south next time, perhaps in Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan or Georgia.  The 2008 Georgian War with Russia demonstrated that the West can’t really do much but watch if Russia decides to nibble away at some territory on its southern frontier, and most of the countries along Russia’s southern border don’t have a clear foreign policy for their citizens to rally around and resist any attempts at annexation by Russia.

What does this mean to the bride seeker?

Surprisingly, very little.  The only significant change that I might see is that a bride seeker from the West will likely need a visa if he wants to meet girls in Crimea since it’s effectively Russian territory now.

Otherwise, there’s not much difference.  Mordinson’s marriage agency in Kharkov, Ukraine is as close to the border between Ukraine and Russia as a bride seeker is likely to get and they are still open for business and accepting clients.

Kharkov hosted an international marathon on April 12, 2014 that seemed to go off without a hitch.  Click to see the video. (the video’s privacy settings won’t allow me to embed the video here)

Brandon from Canada seemed to hit it off with a cute blond on May 24th, the day before the election! Click to see the video.

Lloyd from the UK found this raven beauty on May 16th.  Lloyd even mentions that none of the unrest seems to have hit Kharkov.  Click to see the video.

If anything, this is great news!  Despite the unrest being reported, it seems very localized and not in much danger of escalating.  But these events will be a reminder to the Ukrainian girls that life in Ukraine still has the potential to change for the worst at a moment’s notice and they will likely be more receptive to marrying foreigners and immigrating to stable western countries than they might have been in recent years.  I can see no reason why a western man can’t find love in Ukraine.