While studying search terms that men use while searching for Russian brides, I noticed that huge number of searches occur using the term “free dating site”. We’re talking about more than a million American searches per month using the terms “free dating site“, “free dating websites”, “free dating”, etc..

Now these search terms don’t specifically designate “Russian brides”. But to the search engines, because Russian brides are also actively searched for, these search terms will produce results that lead men to Russian women that post their profiles on so-called “free” sites.

So to me it’s important to address this issue of finding a Russian bride on a free dating site. And here are my perspectives on the issue.

The bottom line is that yes of course you can find a Russian woman on a free dating site. But I certainly don’t advise it. In fact I strongly recommend against it.

Why?

1. First of all let’s define “free dating site.” When men search for this they are invariably looking for something FREE, as in no cost, no credit card payments, no hidden fees, no nothing. Now realistically, what value in terms of product quality or service can you expect to receive without having to pay anything? Do the terms “you get what you pay for” or “there is no free lunch” ring any bells for you?

2. Can a free dating site really be free? The most you can realistically expect for free is something like Facebook where you can connect with a variety of people and share stuff. But Facebook is NOT a dating site and does not operate like one even though people no doubt can find romantic relationships there. But to use it as a dating site is a very haphazard process.

To qualify as a dating site, a site must provide for you to search profiles and meet people for dating and marriage. And if a site advertises itself as a “free dating site” the first thing you need to ask yourself is “at what point in my membership am I going to get a bill?”

3. O.K., numbers 1 and 2 are obvious put-downs to using “free dating site” when searching for a Russian bride. And when it comes to Russian brides, or any foreign bride for that matter, consider this: to legally provide an American man with communication interfaces with a foreign woman, a marriage agency or dating site MUST conform to American IMBRA law. Conforming to this law requires certain manual processes to be performed by the site. Manual processes require labor expenses to be paid. So how does a “free dating site” pay their labor expenses? If they have no labor expenses they are no doubt NOT conforming to IMBRA, and if they don’t conform to this law, guess what: You may meet the love of your life on a free dating site but not be allowed to bring her to America on a fiancee visa to marry her. In fact, you’ll probably have problems bringing her to America on a spousal visa if you marry her in her native country. So NEVER use a site that circumvents IMBRA; and if the marriage agency/dating site has expenses, expect at a minimum to compensate them for those expenses. Read this article on our site to find out more about IMBRA: http://russianbridefacts.com/blog/2011/10/16/more-about-imbra-what-is-it-and-how-to-deal-with-it/

4. You are much more likely to find scamming women on a free dating site than on a paid site. This seems counterintuitive but I believe it to be true. You’d think that scammers would hang out on paid sites where men already have their wallets open. But this is not necessarily the case for three reasons.

First, paid sites generally have barriers to scammers. Barriers are a hassle and most scammers work to avoid the hassles.

And secondly, as a practical matter, if you’re on a paid site making payments for connection services, there’s less money available than if you’re on a free dating site where all your money is available to the scammer.

And last it’s a matter of psychology, and I verified this with a couple of trustable, savvy female friends. Lots of women detest men that use free dating sites to find a foreign bride. Their attitude is “damned cheapskate- - he’s got the money but is too cheap to spend it for a good woman; I’ll show him.”

So, enough bum-rapping free dating sites while searching for a Russian woman to marry. It seems to me that items 3 and 4 above are killer arguments against using one of these sites.

But it’s important here to make a HUGE differentiation. A “free dating site” is not by any means the same as a site that offers “free registration.” When a marriage agency or dating site offers you “free registration” it means you’re being provided with the opportunity to post your profile on their site. They will also process your profile per IMBRA requirements which means they have invested in you with the hope that in the future you will purchase some of their introduction services.

And a legitimate “free registration” site will always tell you up front what your costs will be for each of the products and services they provide. Further, they will not guarantee you success, only the opportunity to reach for it.

For examples of legitimate “free registration” sites check out either of our top recommended sites for finding a Russian bride.

A Foreign Affair Home Page

Elenas Models Home Page.

And here are links to our reviews for each of these sites:

 A Foreign Affair Review

Review Elenas Models

EACH of these sites provides:

A. Free registration which opens many site features for you in addition to allowing you to post your profile on their site.

B. Protection for you with regards to security features, scam busting procedures, and “squeaky clean” IMBRA compliance.

C. Many thousands of Russian women who are seriously seeking marriage to foreign men.

So in summing up, if you’re serious about finding a Russian bride, avoid using a free dating site and focus instead on legitimate  marriage agency sites. This will protect you and provide you with a quality opportunity to find the love of your life.

Wishing you success in your search,

Gary.

P.S.

Here’s a small sample of Russian women from A Foreign Affair’s site. You can click each woman’s photo for her profile info and more pics. ENJOY!

In this post I hope to clarify something that some men may have only a “murky” understanding about. The issue is about Ukrainian brides versus Russian brides. This is an important topic to discuss because there is a (justifiably) huge interest in Russian brides yet only very small interest in Ukrainian brides.

For example, a recent month’s number of Google searches for “Russian bride” totaled 60,500 for American searches alone. And yet for that same month there were only 5,400 American searches for “Ukrainian bride”.

In other words, the number of searches for “Ukrainian bride” is less than 10% of the number of searches for “Russian bride.” Presumably the reason for this is that men don’t relate to Ukrainian women being the same as Russian women. Strictly speaking, this is true. They are not the same because their are differences between Ukrainian culture and Russian culture.

But by and large, the top two reasons why men seek Russian brides, beauty and culture/family values, are very well satisfied by Ukrainian women.

Following are some points to illustrate why I make this statement.

1. The ancestry of Ukrainian and Russian women is predominantly Slavic/Northern European. They thus are very close in physical characteristics. And the Russian woman’s reputation for taking care of herself and paying attention to her appearance is just as applicable to Ukrainian women. Take a trip to Kiev and you’ll be certain that Sports Illustrated should do the recruiting for their photo shoots there.

2. The Ukrainian culture is very strongly agrarian based, perhaps even more so than Russian culture. To understand the significance of this read this post on our site. http://russianbridefacts.com/blog/2011/08/30/mother-russia-russian-womens-family-values/. And too, both countries are primarily Orthodox Christian.

3. The languages are different but not dramatically so. A Russian person visiting Ukraine can get along fairly easily. And the same holds true for a Ukrainian person visiting Russia.

4. Kiev, the capitol of Ukraine, was for some hundreds of years, the capitol of Russia. On the following link are some very scholarly descriptions of Kievan Russia that will illustrate the former intertwined nature of these two countries.
http://www.answers.com/topic/kievan-rus.

5. Russian women are generally very well educated. This is because Russia has maintained its high standards of education that were instituted during the Soviet era. Those same standards were enforced in Ukraine during its period of Soviet domination; and since the breakup of the USSR and subsequent Ukrainian independence, Ukraine has maintained those high standards of education. So it’s reasonable to expect to find well educated women whether they are from Russia or Ukraine.

So what we have here men is a group of women who are attractive, well educated and imbued with a cultural identity that embraces strong family values. And you’ll find them in both Russia and Ukraine.

Thus to answer the question asked in the title of this article, “Is A Ukrainian Bride The Same As A Russian Bride?”, the answer is NO. There are subtle differences, but none that will prevent a man from experiencing the kind of relationship he hoped for with a Russian bride if he happens to locate a Ukrainian bride instead.

In fact, there are some hugely positive reasons to search for a bride from Ukraine instead of one from Russia.

A. Whether it’s from politics, economics or whatever, there are a LOT more women available from Ukraine than there are from Russia. You can verify this for yourself at A Foreign Affair’s web site.

Go to A Foreign Affair Home Page  and click on “search engine” at the top of the home page. Then scroll down and select “Russia” and click “click here to execute your search.” Now un-select “Russia” and select instead “Ukraine”. Search again. The women selected from these searches will be listed on the left side of the search results page and you can click their thumbnail photos to see each woman’s profile and additional large photos. Note that as of the end of March, 2012 the searches resulted in about 4,900 Russian women and 11,500 Ukrainian women or more than twice as many Ukrainian women than Russian women. I’ve checked out this metric on several other sites and it’s consistent.

So if your “thing” is beauty and family values for a potential bride, then by choosing from Ukrainian women you have a much larger field to select from.

B. If you you want to meet and marry a foreign woman then the law in America requires that you travel to her country to meet her. (There are exceptions such as if she’s already in America on certain types of visas, but let’s keep things simple - - generally speaking, you have to travel to her country.)

Travel to Russia is not hugely complicated but does require some “jumping through hoops” (and expense) for a visitor visa.

On the other hand, travel to Ukraine is super simple. Americans need only a U.S. passport — no visa, no red tape. Just get on the plane and go.

C. Your fiancee visa expenses will be the same for a Ukrainian bride as for a Russian bride. BUT your expenses for meeting and visiting with her in her home country will be less for a Ukrainian woman than for a Russian woman. This is just a matter of metrics of cost of living in Russia versus Ukraine. Moscow is one of the most expensive cities in the world. Kiev by comparison is an absolute bargain, as is Odessa.

D. Presently, Russian politics are a bit complicated. I personally would not feel comfortable with Russian emigration regulations or Russian/American relationships when it comes to fiancee visa processing to bring a Russian woman to America. Perhaps I’m being reactionary, but that is my perspective. On the other hand, bringing a Ukrainian woman to America is not likely to be problematic.

So here’s the bottom line.

All things considered, it seems to me that more men would be better served by searching for their “Russian brides” in Ukraine.

There is one thing to be aware of though. Even with all of the cultural similarities between Russian women and Ukrainian women, Ukrainian people do not like being referred to as Russians. There is a strong sense of nationalism in Ukraine and Ukrainian people want to be referred to as Ukrainians. So if you’re searching for your “Russian bride” in Ukraine, make certain you always refer to her as your “Ukrainian bride.”

As I’ve illustrated, it’s easy to locate a Ukrainian bride on the A Foreign Affair site. It’s also easy to locate one on the Elenas Models site by using the country drop down list on the search page. You can check it out at: Elenas Models Home Page.

And here are our reviews for these two sites:

A Foreign Affair Review

Review Elenas Models

That’s it for now folks. I hope this post helped broaden your perspective about Ukrainian brides and opens new possibilities for you. Good Luck and happy hunting.

Gary.

P.S. Here’s a tiny sample of Ukrainian women from A Foreign Affair:

I just re-watched (probably for the 4th or 5th time) the movie Doctor Zhivago. All I can say is that I so admire the producer and actors for having created such a beautiful epic drama of love and war. WOW! And the photography was awesome.

And being something of student of Russian culture (that happens when you’re married to a Russian woman) I picked up on some tidbits from the movie I thought to be worthy of sharing.

TIDBIT # 1. Yes it’s only a movie so how much can you assign to truth? But the author of the book, Boris Pasternak, was Russian so the following quote has some credence to me. The quote is “scratch a Russian and you’ll find a peasant.” Now this line kind of “rang my bell” because of other studies I’ve made about Russian culture. The statement harkens back to the agrarian influence which is so much a part of Russian culture. I wrote about that in this post http://russianbridefacts.com/blog/2011/08/30/mother-russia-russian-womens-family-values/.

TIDBIT # 2. On several occasions in the movie the dialog refers to the armed confrontation between “the reds” (Bolsheviks) and “the whites” (anti-Bolsheviks) along with the foreign interventionists aligned with the whites.

Again, it’s just a movie and if you know nothing of the facts of history, that key phrase “foreign interventionists” could easily slip by you. But if you do know something about Russian history, then you know that the foreign interventionists assisting the white Russians against the red Russians were American and other allied armed forces.

That’s right folks! American troops with boots on the ground. Locked and loaded conducting combat operations. Killing Russians on Russian soil. THIS HAPPENED. IT’S TRUE.

There are several articles about this on Wikipedia. Explore them at your leisure for some good insight into the political, strategic, and operational details of what took place.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siberian_Intervention

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Bear_Expedition

Obviously the intervention failed because the “reds” won and communism held sway in Russia for the better part of the next 70 years.

And about this intervention you say, “that’s interesting, but it’s all behind us now.”

Har d-har,har. Imagine how Americans would feel if, during the American Civil War, Russia had landed several thousand troops in New Orleans to help out the Confederate army. And If you paid any attention at all to the recent Russian presidential election you no doubt heard/read Vladimir Putin lambasting foreign meddling in the Russian election process purportedly trying to destabilize the Russian political system. He wasn’t just throwing out political rhetoric. Russia has a very long history of foreign powers meddling with its domestic political affairs. It’s an activity that is strongly guarded against. And it’s also strongly resented by all Russians.

So now I have a new mission in front of me. I have to read the book, Doctor Zhivago. The movie was fantastic. But it’s been my experience that books are often better than any subsequent movie based on any particular book. So perhaps the book Doctor Zhivago will be a real thrill.

One thing I’ll be looking for is to see if Mr. Pasternak actually names the foreign powers that intervened in Russia’s Civil War. They were not named in the movie. So it will be interesting to see if that or other historical facts were “glossed over” in the movie.

Well that’s it for now. I’ve got a slew of things on my list to write about. So check back soon for more about - - who knows?

Good Luck to you.

Gary.

P.S. Meet a Russian woman from the A Foreign Affair site. Just don’t talk politics with her.