“Are Mail Order Brides For Real? These Beautiful Women Must Be Scammers!”
This is pretty much THE question that every guy asks when they first begin to investigate pursuing a beautiful mail order bride. And the basic answer is easy: Yes.
They are very much for real and they have a lot of great reasons for wanting to meet foreign men. If you are interested in that question check out our article that answers the question: Why Do Women From Eastern Europe Want to Marry Foreign Men?
This article is examining the current state of the Russian mail order bride system in Eastern Europe. It looks at industry trends, statistics, and the basic lay of the land. If you are really interested in Slavic women, you should read both articles and the country articles that we artfully hide below the stunning photos of women from each country.
For the purposes of this article we are going to lump together all of the women of from the former Soviet Union nations except, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, together. Those three, known as the Baltic States, are now part of the European Union now and that makes the dating situation there significantly different.
This article is going to focus on Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova. These three countries all border the European Union and have similar Slavic cultures.
They all use the Cyrillic alphabet and worship in the Orthodox Christian tradition. and histories. They were all part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and they all endured all that entailed.
Here is where the modern mail order bride movement began in the 1990s. And most of the men searching for “Russian mail order brides” really do not care whether she carries a Russian, Ukrainian, Belorussian, or Moldovan passport.
Yes, there are differences between these nations, but they have been lumped together in online dating since the beginning.
The modern international dating movement started in the 1990s, and, despite the feminist propaganda it is still going strong.
Negative Stereotypes About Russian Women
There are a lot of negative stereotypes about Russian women in both in the media and on various internet message boards and international dating blogs.
One of the most common complaints is the Russian women are cold, suspicious, and cynical.
To address this issue first you have to remember Russian history. These ladies – no matter how delicate, charming, and sweet – are descended from some of recent history’s greatest survivors.
Their great-grandparents survived the pogroms, food riots, the First World War, and the Russian Revolution. Their grandparents survived Stalin’s gulag’s, Hitler, and Stalin’s strategy of frontal assault after frontal assault in the Second World War, or Great Patriotic War as it is known in Eastern Europe.
In the twentieth century there was not much to smile about in Russia, Ukraine, or Moldova, and some researchers claim no place suffered more than Belarus during the Second World War. This sort of history breeds a certain sort of awareness.
For instance, Slavs are famous for not smiling. This is true if across the region. As one article explained on the Russian smile, “…randomly smiling at strangers in public is often viewed as a sign of mental illness or inferior intellect.”
That would be OK, but while their ancestors were surviving Stalin and fighting Hitler our ancestors were writing syrupy movies and songs so sweet that you practically need an insulin shot after you hear them that insisted smiling is the key to everything.
It insisted that women smile, smile, smile.
And there is pretty much nothing Western men like more than a smiling woman or as the great James Taylor sang: “No one can tell me that I’m doing wrong today, Whenever I see you smile at me.”
Russian women do smile. They just need a reason to smile. And they do like the sort of happy go lucky laid-back attitude of a lot of Western men, particularly Americans and Canadians. Because generally Russian men have not given them a lot of reasons to smile.
Dating Russian Men
Russia and the other nations of Eastern Europe have undergone incredible political, economic, and cultural transformation since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and some of those changes have not been particularly positive for women, particularly Russian women.
Now, many of the most beautiful, talented, and educated Russian women have no interest in dating Russian men. A recent article by a Russian woman, Anna Nemtsova, at The Daily Beast entitled, Russia’s Single Ladies Fed Up With Country’s Useless Bachelors, explains:
The litany of complaints that Russian ladies have against their male counterparts is long: They smoke too much and drink too much. They cheat shamelessly and curse freely. They expect their girlfriends and wives to clean for them, cook for them, and to look like models. More seriously, they are often violent and feel threatened by independent, high-earning women.
That is really only the first sip of Vodka in this article and it really helps explain why Sexy Russian Models and stunning Ukrainian fitness models want to meet foreign men.
This article is a MUST read for any man interested in Russian mail order brides – an ABSOLUTE must read! Here is a link to that article: Russia’s Single Ladies Fed Up With Countries Useless Bachelors! But the situation has actually gotten worse since the article was written.
In 2017, the Russian Duma, in an almost unbelievable act of male arrogance, decriminalized most domestic violence.
According to the British newspaper, The Guardian, “Under current Russian law, violence against a spouse or children that does not result in broken bones is punishable by a 30,000-rouble (£375) fine or a 15-day jail sentence. Human rights groups say the average punishment is only a 5,000-rouble (£62) fine.”
Think about the damage you can do to someone without breaking a bone? Worse, according to a report by Human Rights Watch…
Police, courts, and sometimes even service providers blame the victims and advise women seeking protection to reconcile with their abusers or avoid “provoking” them.
So, women simply have nowhere to turn.
The situation is not as bad in Belarus, Moldova, or Ukraine, but women are clearly subservient. It is not unusual to see couples walking hand in hand down the street in the summer Kiev or Kharkiv.
They usually seem very happy, but the man is pulling the woman along like a prize heifer at the county fair.
She might want to stop and look at a dress in a window. If he is not interested, he tugs on her arm like he is saving her from drowning and more or less pulls her down the street.
She does not resist. She might glance back once, but she is apparently happy to be tugged down the street.
This is not an exaggeration. Not one native born American woman in a hundred, no matter how traditional or even subservient she claims to be, would allow herself to be tugged up and down the street like this.
And no American or Canadian man would dare tug on his lady like this. He might be a SEAL, but if he acted like this for long he would soon be an ex-SEAL. It is simply that odd.
Which is why Russian brides are still a thing. They watch American and European movies. They love romantic comedies and sweet kind guys from these movies. (You have a lot to live up to.)
Slavic women want to meet a good man. A man who will treat them with the love and respect they deserve. That is the primary reason why so many amazing Russian women sign up with international dating sites and please don’t disappoint them.
Negative Media Portrayals
One of the biggest problems that makes men wonder if Russian women are for real are the negative media portrayals. The main reason for the media’s focus on negative stories is pretty simple. It gets eyeballs.
The media is in the business of discussing the strange and unusual because people are drawn to extraordinary stories.
No one except Flight Tracker covers the hundreds of thousands of successful commercial airline flights around the world every day, but just let one little plane stall a few hundred feet up on take off and there is a full-blown media circus.
So, in the world of international dating the media loves stories about beautiful scammers who duped some pathetic man they met on an international dating site or awful tales of bastards who likes to beat the poor foreign girl he met online. It’s is the romantic version of a 787 going down in a cornfield.
Fair enough, but those stories represent just a tiny percentage of the relationships between Western men and foreign women that first blossom online.
The vast majority of the relationships turn out to be successes to one degree or another with the ups and downs common in any relationship. As our article Divorce and the Mail Order Bride points out these relationships seem to last BETTER than other relationships.
But that really doesn’t answer many questions for most guys, particularly for men interested in Eastern European mail order brides.
It just seems hard to believe that so many beautiful, intelligent, talented young women are ready to leave their native country and journey around the world to marry a man from another culture.
It just doesn’t seem to add up for a lot of men, but that’s because they don’t really understand the culture of post-communist Eastern Europe.
The Reality of Dating Russian Women
One of the most common myths about dating Eastern European women is that they are all simply scammers of one variety or another.
Men on some dating message boards complain that they are not serious or just date foreigners for the free food and great gifts.
That is simply not true. In the last two years, 2017 and 2018, where data was easily available the United States State Department issued some 2593 K-1 Visas in these four countries.
Fiancée Visas
Source: United States State Department
And of course, many women marry men from Europe, Canada, Australia, or another developed nation, so the overall number of foreign men marrying Russian women each year is significant.
And that does not count the large number of expats who decide to just live with their hot Russian bride in Eastern Europe.
Expat Lifestyle In Eastern Europe
Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine, has become an expat hot spot. According to the best stats available it appears that some 230,000 foreigners have moved to Ukraine in the past dozen years and as any Ukrainian man will tell you most of those foreigners appear to be American, European, and Middle Eastern men who seem to appreciate the low cost of living and incredibly beautiful women.
Kiev, the capital of Ukraine, is a great international city. It is easy to get to from anywhere in Europe and you can find deals from the United States if you try.
Kayak had a flight from New York for $615 recently. And it is an awesome city with lots of world-class restaurants and museums. If you want to know more check out our International Male Traveler’s Guide to Kiev.
Kayak had a flight from New York for $615 recently. And it is an awesome city with lots of world-class restaurants and museums. If you want to know more check out our International Male Traveler’s Guide to Kiev.
A lot of expats also end up in Odessa, Ukraine’s chief port city. It is a very sexy, party city. For Americans, it feels a lot like “New Orleans on the Black Sea,” but, unlike the Crescent City, Odessa has beaches and enough bikinis to make your eyes pop. If you want more check out our International Male Travelers Guide to Odessa.
There used to be a large number of expats living in Russia before Putin, but that has changed a lot in the last twenty years. Russia has made getting a visa much tougher and made actually living there hard too because they require a variety of internal security cards and proof.
Apparently, all of that has made renting a nightmare and it is impossible to buy property.
But, frankly, if you are willing to go through the hassle to get a Russian visa it is an incredible experience. Russians tend to be more friendly to Americans than you would ever guess because there are not many American visitors since Putin’s crackdown.
There is a significant crowd of European tourists, but Americans are far rarer and this will certainly give you some allure with the girls.
Moscow is an incredible city for tourists from the Kremlin to the Victory Museum for the Great Patriotic War. Oh, and of course tens of thousands of beautiful Russian women.
If you read our Male Traveler’s Guide To Moscow you just might book a plane ticket in the next twenty minutes.
Minsk, the capital of Belarus, is an off the beaten path expat center, but it is quickly growing in reputation. The city is almost awash in construction cranes and a lot more foreigners have moved there in recent years.
A Final Word On Slavic Women
So, yes, sexy Russian mail order brides are real and they are wondering if the stories of the kind Western men are real too.
They are educated and more sophisticated than mail order brides from Asia or Latin America, but if you are a good guy and you win the heart of one of these ladies she will move mountains to make you happy.
Why not give it a try?