Russian liberated 'Ukraine' offers migrants from West rich opportunities (Part 1)

Novorossiya will once again be a Russian economic powerhouse and a magnet for migrants from Europe and the US, as it has been for centuries.

Downtown Donetsk street art: “Unity lives where Russia is.”

I tweet about migrating to Russia at @cbausman and Telegram. DMs are open.

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Click here for Part 2

What? you say? Isn’t it a war zone? Well, yes, but it looks like the war might end soon, and certainly with Russia keeping what it currently holds, and possibly a great deal more. However it comes out, this region will be very attractive for Westerners moving to Russia, a growing trend since Putin opened Russia to immigration from Europe and North America. This might sound counterintuitive, so let me explain. To understand why, one needs to know something about history of these lands, which are not ‘Ukrainian’, rather Russian, their correct historical name being ‘Novorossiya.’

The sky as we drove South through Lipetsk.

I recently returned from 4 days in the Donetsk Republic, and what I found was one of the most unexpected I’ve ever encountered in this enormous country, which is saying a lot. I went at the invitation the Donetsk government, whose goal it was to promote their side of the story regarding the war, and I was put on a jam-packed program focusing on this. Even for me who followed the conflict very closely from 2014 - 2018 or so, it was a big eye-opener. I don’t follow it as closely these days, and while curious about the latest developments, don’t write about it, because so many others do exhaustively. Before going, a Russian friend was explaining the history of this part of Russia going back a couple of centuries, and this is something I realized IS very relevant to future migration to Russia from the West, and I tried to gather as much info about that while there.

Entire villages flattened near Avdeevka. Not a single structure left standing.

Our program consisted of being shuttled around from morning till night to locations relevant to the war: buildings in the capital city of Donetsk completely obliterated by the odd rocket which landed in central, civilian areas, museums dedicated to the war, meetings with military priests, visits to churches damaged by shelling, to recent front lines where the destruction of former towns and villages was well-nigh complete, vast amounts of destroyed NATO equipment littered all over the place, very impressive new war memorials everywhere lionizing the heroes of her remarkable defense over the last 10 years and tear-inducing ones mourning the martyrdom of her women and children, and endless conversation with our hosts and their friends, themselves military men who have been there since it all started in 2014. We took a day-trip to Mariupol where we were shown the mind-boggling scale of urban reconstruction underway. I’ve been posting a lot of this Twitter, and will be posting more.

A German tank with US Maxpro infantry combat vehicles behind them. The logo of the manufacturer, “Rheinmetall” is visible on the front of the tank.

To me, the most important insight was how these 10 tough years have affected the psychology of the people who have remained, bringing out the best in people, purifying them, as it were, and crucially, strengthening their Orthodox faith. I was traveling with the Russian Christian TV Channel Spas, so we met many Christians, and I was struck by how many of them there were, especially in the military. But before I explain that, some history.

A US Maxpro infantry combat vehicle burned to a crisp.

First of all, some basics. You may have noticed that on this blog, and on Twitter, I put ‘Ukraine’ and ‘Ukrainians’ in quotation marks, and often just refer to them as Russians. I keep having to repeat this, because so many people on our side keep referring to ‘Ukrainians’, as if this describes a people or ethnicity. This is falling into the enemy’s little word tricks, and it misleads even the best people. So for the 100th time, there is not now, and never ever has been, a ‘Ukrainian’ people, ethnicity, language (real), literature, or national consciousness. This is vital to fully grasp what follows. They always have been, and are Russians, and have ever thought of themselves that way. I can write a whole article about this backed by facts, but for now, just trust me, this is the truth.

Very high quality memorials to the defenders of Donbass are very common.

The historically accurate and correct name for this part of Russia is ‘New Russia’, ‘Novorossiya’ in Russian. It was so-named in the 18th century when these regions were wrested from centuries of Islamic tyranny by Orthodox Christian generals from the Ottoman empire in the reign of Catherine the Great. They stretch much further West than what Russia has recently liberated from the clutches of the Gay American Empire (GAE), including Kharkov, Odessa, Kherson, and Kiev. All of this is historic Russia, much of it suffering for centuries under the Turks.

More memorials

I didn’t realize until after long rambling conversations with our hosts, sometimes bouncing over bombed out country landscapes, the degree to which the Donbass, a small region inbetween two big powers, Russia and NATO, ended up in a strategic position where their best option of many bad ones, was to simply endure years of war and abuse, toughing it out despite the grimness and grisly sacrifice, an eery foreshadowing of what The Resistance is enduring today in Gaza and Lebanon.

We encountered the banner of Christ, a Russian battle flag going back 900 years, everywhere. It is the most popular flag among Russian units.

Indeed, this visit cemented my impression that Donbass is part of The Resistance front in the Middle East. The genocide underway there is 100 times more grisly and awful, but the forces and funds perpetrating it are essentially the same. The behavior and tactics of the ‘Ukrainian’ military are very similar in spirit and complete absence of ethics, as is the relentless lying accompanying it in a massive bot driven media barrage. It’s almost as if the IDF advised and trained the Ukrainian military and propagandists, which I have no doubt they did, as NATO, the IDF, Western Intel agencies and Mossad have evolved into an interlocking criminal alliance.

Donbass also endured an assassination campaign against their military leaders very similar to Israel’s current one against Hezbollah and Hamas. I describe below the peculiar tough mentality of the people of Donbass below, and the history of how that emerged over centuries. This produced remarkable leaders during the intial 2014 uprising whose names and deeds have become legend - Givi, Mozgovoi, Motorola, Batman, Infant (Malysh), Batya, Zakharchenko, and more. One by one they were assassinated. At the time, Kiev’s very well prepared and funded propaganda forces very successfully sowed disinfo that this was all just infighting inbetween criminal warlords.

I asked our hosts about this and they scoffed at the idea. They allowed that it might be true about some of the less well-known ones, but that re the big names: Givi, Mozgovoi, Motorola, and Zakharchenko, it was clearly Kiev’s secret service. They further explained that these men knew that they could be taken out at any time because Kiev had 100 ways to get to them because of the ease of infiltrating agents into Donbass, for this is a civil war between Russians with no ethnic distinction between combatants. But they still stepped-up to lead despite understanding it was a likely death sentence. The strategy is pure Israel, along with other tactics such as using civilians as shields, indiscriminate shelling of women and children, deliberate targeting of churches, schools and hospitals, etc. - all tactics we see on horrific display in Gaza and Lebanon.

Alexander Zakharchenko, the first head of state of Donetsk, murdered by Kiev’s Mossad-inspired secret service.

Every loss has been turned into a memorial. Restaurant in central Donetsk which was booby-trapped, killing Zakharchenko.

To simplify recent history greatly, when the US foreign policy Blob engineered a color revolution, a euphemism for a coup, in Kiev in 2014, bringing in a rabidly anti-Russian government, the people of Donbass, like the Crimeans, said, no thanks, we’re out. Instead of being allowed to secede, they were attacked, and thus the war began. The Donbass was outgunned and outnumbered, their one advantages being 1) Fighting a defensive war from the bombed out husks of industrial infrastructure, and 2) the iron-clad will of tough men ready to die, recognized by Clausewitz as one of the key factors in war.

The Blob’s long game was always to draw Russia into a major war, something they partially achieved in 2022 by putting Russia in a position where its only logical move was to launch the so-called SMO, a risky move at the time which has turned out better than it might have. For the first 8 years of fighting, i.e. from 2014, Donbass had a powerful and strong friend to the East, but that friend could only help surreptiously, carefully limiting aid to what it considered would not provoke an escalation by NATO. There were stealth supplies of armaments, Russian military posing as volunteers, and real volunteers coming to Donbass’s aide, but it was barely enough to hold the line, with the fighting men of Donbass paying a terrible price. Casualties in war have propaganda value and are therefore kept secret and under or overstated. One of the many unsettling things about modern industrial war is that once the killing gets underway, observers are usually unsure about how bad it is, with realistic estimates usually pieced together by historians later. 13,000 civilian deaths, more wounded, massive infrastructure damage, collapse of the economy and complete disruption of civilian life are not in dispute.

Our hosts explained to us, and one can sense it in the very air, that this 10.5 year life and death struggle, still underway, has profoundly affected the mentality of the people, and this is relevant to what is likely to transpire once peace returns, and why I believe this region will greatly attract migrants from the West.

To understand this, one needs to understand who the people of Novorossiya were before the 2014 conflict, and where they came from. Novorossiya, much like the American West, was frontier country. Centuries of spoilage and pillage at the hands of the Turks had left this region depopulated, its hapless Slav villagers regularly raided and kidnapped - sold into the Ottoman slave markets. The edges of the Ottoman empire were basically controlled by marauding local warlords whose main economic model was piracy, pillage, plunder, and extortion. These bandits were an ethnic mix of mostly Turks and Mongols - the Crimean Tatars one of the better known subgroups.

A WW2 German Luger pistol in a war museum

WW2 German “Settler” or “Migrant” identity documents from a war museum.

The great Christian moral feat the Russian empire achieved in vanquishing these criminals is not well known in the West, nor are the implausible feats of her commanders, many of them exemplars of Christian piety, fighting under the banner of Christian Orthodoxy against Islam. Admiral Ushakov has been canonized and many faithful, including former Minister of Defense Shoigu, are calling for the canonization of General Suvorov, whose application of Christian faith to life and war is legendary. This white-out of Russian history is no accident. I keep saying in these articles how the lying about Russian history has been extravagant and going on for centuries. The Russo-Turkic wars of the 18th century are but one glaring example of many. Military buffs will love the mind-boggling history of Suvorov’s and Ushakov’s successes. It is no exageration to describe them as miraculous, one of the arguments for canonization.

A chart at a war museum showing the clear advantage Russia had in military equipment in 2023.

After this liberation, people began moving to Novorossia from central Russia. She attracted the brave and adventurous, the risk-takers, the big-dreamers, men with vision, ability, and toughness, men in search of freedom and opportunity, much like the American frontier. And not just from Russia, but from Europe too, primarily, as to the US in that age, Germans. Former Russian forts gradually grew into towns. Churches were built. Monasteries took root and grew. Like America, she fostered a hardy Christianity due to the conditions.

Like America, these empty lands were blessed with great natural wealth. The soil was unbelievably rich, the famed ‘Black Earth’ reaching to 2 yards of the world’s most fertile topsoil. The eastern regions were rich in coal, oil, and ore, spawning extraction industries driving the blazing industrial growth of Tsarist Russia in late 19th - early 20th c., again mirroring the American experience. Novorossiya has a long, temperate coast along the Sea of Azov, which feeds into the Black Sea, and from there, via Constantinople to the Mediterranean. The mighty Dneipr and its tributaries connect the region to northern hubs like Smolensk, and even the Baltic Sea. Ports and railroads grew. The region attracted entrepreneurs from Europe, again, mostly from Germany, who had the technical skills to build these industries. Many great fortunes were made. The region has an industrial town named New York, evidence of this immigration. Why it was so named has not survived, with various theories: one that it was named by an American entrepreneur, another that Germans named it after the north-western German city of Jork.

A 1921 poster reflecting the importance of Donbass to Russian industry of the time. It is titled “Donbass is the heart of Russia”

Despite all this activity, few major cities emerged in what is today the Donbass. Instead a network of industrial settlements spread, built around mines, factories, railroad hubs and ports. The region became an investment priority for the Soviets, who built the industrial powerhouses of Donetsk and Mariupol and their ginormous steel plants and mines, the scenes of so many recent fierce battles, and imported Russians from European Russia to work them, creating large cities, Donetsk with a pre-2014 population of 1 million and Mariupol with 0.5 million. The ‘historic’ centers are marked by Stalinist Classical style, big columns, some ornamentation, and somewhat human scale, before the inhuman architectural disasters visited on Russia in the 60s - 80s. In 4 days I counted only a handful of buildings predating the revolution.

The government seat of the Donetsk People’s Republic, and example of the atrocious inhuman Soviet architecture of the 70s and 80s.

           Donetsk residents have marched around the Donetsk government building every 
          day since 2014 carrying icons and crosses to protect it from shelling. It was never hit,
                                                    despite its massive size.

Poster on door of the above building: “We won in 1943, we’ll win this time too!”

Interesting side note: Novorossiya has substantial Greek ethnic heritage. I wasn’t able to acertain current numbers, but many Greeks fled there in the 18th c. from Crimea, where they had flourished for centuries during and after Byzantine rule, fleeing genocide at the hands of the Turks / Tatars. Mariupol and Melitopol are Greek names, with more dotting the Azov coast. They became the strongest of Russian patriots, remembering who gave them shelter from that catastrophe, and sharing an Orthodox faith. In 2014, historically Greek Donbass towns were among the most active in running ‘Ukrainian' ‘nationalists’ out, standing with Russia.

A Greek town as we approached Mariupol.

Even the pre-WW2 years of Soviet industrialization attracted the adventurous. The Soviets couldn’t achieve everything through force and intimidation. While savaging Novorossiya’s prosperous farms with famines and murder, they granted industrial workers in the cities privileges, encouraging them to move there. This included less persecution of the church, perhaps because they figured that religion was not a strong threat among an ideologized, proletarian working class.

Devotionals and icons carried by Kiev troops.

The Soviets invested heavily not just in industry, but also cultural and social life, with top-notch theaters, classical orchestras, ballet, sports teams and stadiums. The Stalinist downtowns of Donetsk and Mariupol, while completely Soviet, have an unexpected charm and grace to them, with ubiquitous well-planned parks and boulevards of tall graceful white Aspens with thick white, birch-like trunks.

The main Theater in Donetsk, a great source of pride and always sold out, a typical example of Stalinist classical architecture.

Click here for Part 2