Russia has done this before
Russia has recruited Westerners with salesmen before. Under Catherine the Great, colonisation agents toured Europe advertising crown land, and in 1786 one of them, Georg von Trappe, brought Danzig’s Mennonites east at government expense (source). The poorest 228 families made the journey the following year.
In 2018 the pitch came back with a new target. A Stavropol deputy ombudsman told RT the region could settle up to 50 Boer families, with a plan for about 500 (RT). Months later he told Sputnik that “over 200 families” had written in (Sputnik).
In August 2024 Vladimir Putin made the offer permanent. Decree 702 gives residence to foreigners who reject “destructive neoliberal ideology” at home, with no language test and no quota (IMI Daily). This time the salesmen are influencers, and the first one we followed is called Sasha.
Meet Sasha
@sashameetsrus is Alexandra “Sasha” Jost, a Hong Kong-born American with Russian roots, who sells Russia as a refuge for traditional Westerners. In February 2025 Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that foreign bloggers promote a “free and safe” Russia at the Kremlin’s expense, and named her among them (Novaya Gazeta Europe). Her own X bio now reads “Sanctioned by the EU for speaking the truth”.
Her X account opened on 2 April 2025, two months after that exposé. X places it in Germany, connecting through the Mexico App Store, a common pattern for accounts run from inside Russia behind a VPN. Her posting clock is a Moscow working day, 09:00 to 19:00, busiest Monday and Tuesday.
The numbers flatter her less than her follower count suggests:
Followers: 71,055
Views on 749 posts, April 2025 to September 2026: 78.4 million
Median views per post: 37,100
Share of all views from her top 50 posts: 53%
Monthly median views: about 66,000 in October 2025, about 17,000 in September 2026
Her biggest hits are culture war, not travel. “Thank God Russia isn’t a woke feminist country” drew 3.2 million views; a post claiming Kaliningrad would be “overrun by migrants” if it were German drew 951,000. Much of her reach beyond the converted comes from critics quote-tweeting her: five of the biggest mocking quote-posts drew over 5 million views between them.
She is not a lone enthusiast. She follows the Kremlin, both Foreign Ministry accounts, Margarita Simonyan, an RT senior producer and Alexander Dugin, and she is in a mutual follow with Putin’s envoy Kirill Dmitriev, whose network we traced in Part Four. But the most revealing thing about Sasha is not who she follows. It is who organises her trips.
The shop window
Sasha’s favourite destination is Nizhny Novgorod, and the relocation agency there says it organises her visits. The OKA Agency’s Telegram channel welcomed “Sasha! Famous vlogger and her husband” to meet its team in early 2025 (OKA). Two posts later it said “the ‘OKA’ Agency organized a trip” to the Khokhloma painting factory, filmed by “Wonderful Sasha” (OKA).
On that trip she met foreigners OKA had already relocated, and made a YouTube video showing “how ‘OKA’ works” (OKA). The agency calls her “our friend” and “our dear friend”. It also records its CEO being invited to the Latin American Chamber of Commerce in Russia by “CCLAR President Domingo, his wife, blogger and our friend Alexandra Sasha Meets Russia” (OKA).
On 11 April 2026 Sasha posted about Errol Musk’s visit to the city, then added: “if you’d like to visit/move to Nizhny Novgorod, you can learn more here” (post). The link carried marketing tags: utm_campaign=errol_musk and utm_content=sasha_jost. OKA was tracking Sasha as a named source of leads.
Her Nizhny Novgorod visits, newest first:
19 July 2026: shows her Mexican in-laws the city (post)
18 May 2026: “A Spring day in Nizhny Novgorod”, 1.97 million views (post)
11 April 2026: Errol Musk’s visit, plus the OKA link tagged
sasha_jost(post)9 February 2026: the Nizhny Novgorod episode of her travel show (post)
19 September 2025: hosts the opening ceremony of the World Youth Festival (post)
Early 2025: OKA organises her Khokhloma factory trip (OKA)
None of her 830 archived posts carries X’s paid-partnership label.
The agency is the state
OKA is not a private relocation firm. Its registered name, ANO “Oblastnoe Kadrovoe Agentstvo”, means the Regional Personnel Agency, a non-profit founded in April 2022 on the base of the Nizhny Novgorod government’s own Corporate University (Pochaina). The regional government lists it as a subordinate organisation of its administrative department (nobl.ru).
Its founding brief was staffing. The government-owned newspaper says the agency was created to meet the needs of the region’s strategic enterprises, including defence-industry plants short of workers (Nizhegorodskaya Pravda). The employers at one 2023 OKA session included the Krasnoye Sormovo shipyard and the Sverdlov plant.
The Western-relocation arm arrived in 2024:
11 June 2024: oka-agency.com is registered to “Pinneker Yakob, ANO Oblastnoe Kadrovoe Agentstvo” (WHOIS).
20 June 2024: Jakob Pinneker becomes general director (Rusprofile).
19 August 2024: Putin signs Decree 702. OKA’s relocation channel is created the same day at 15:22 UTC (OKA).
27 August 2024: OKA quotes the governor calling it a “one-stop shop” for foreigners who share Russian values (OKA).
13 September 2024: Governor Gleb Nikitin records his own pitch for OKA’s channel (OKA).
OKA describes the influencer work as strategy. At a “Strategic Communications Forum”, Pinneker explained why the agency is everywhere online: “We collaborate with global media outlets, bloggers, and thought leaders” (OKA). The tags bear that out. Sasha was tracked as sasha_jost, the German propagandist Alina Lipp as alina_lipp across three campaigns, and the Moscow-based Texan Eddie Gonzales on a blog_tour_arzamas_2026.
The haul is modest. OKA told Rossiya 24 it had received over 1,100 applications and moved nearly 100 Westerners, over 70% of them families (OKA).
The network at a glance
Read it from the top: a decree and a regional government create OKA; OKA organises and tags its bloggers and hosts its celebrity; their audiences feed September’s slogan wave. The lower rows are the older American network the cast plugs into: Butina and her boyfriend Paul Erickson, SPIEF’s stage, and the Turning Point circle around Owens and Mappin. Arrows show documented actions; the dashed line is only a follow, and the dotted line marks a parallel, not a link.
The celebrity draw
Errol Musk is the agency’s star guest. The pro-Kremlin Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs arranged his two-week tour in April 2026, with a high-tech plant in the Nizhny Novgorod region on the itinerary (Moscow Times). OKA says it “hosted an exclusive gathering” with him for its relocation community (OKA).
Two EU-sanctioned bloggers then sold the visit. Sasha wrote that he “sat down with Americans and Canadians who relocated with the support from the OKA Agency”, with the link tagged sasha_jost. Alina Lipp wrote it up in German for Telegram, tagged alina_lipp (post).
Errol’s own agenda is resettlement. He floated a Tesla plant in Nizhny Novgorod and a plan to move 50 Afrikaner families to farm in the Vladimir region, discussed with the governor at the farm resort of British-born John Kopiski (Moscow Times). The governor boasted that about 50 Europeans had bought property in Dobrograd, a town built for foreigners, and local farmers gathered over 7,000 signatures against the plan.
It is the Stavropol pitch of 2018 again, down to the 50 families, and it borrows a story Washington had already made respectable.
Donald Trump froze refugee admissions in January 2025, then in February carved out one exception: white Afrikaners (PassBlue). The first 59 arrived that May (Fortune). Between October 2025 and April 2026, 6,069 refugees reached the US, all but three of them South African, and in May 2026 the year’s cap was raised to 17,500 at an estimated extra cost of $100 million (Mother Jones).
The justification is a claimed “white genocide”. Elon Musk posted in March 2025 that a major South African party was “actively promoting” it (The Conversation). A Heinrich Böll Foundation analysis traces Trump’s executive order to years of lobbying by the Afrikaner group AfriForum, backed vocally by Musk (Böll Foundation). It argues the campaign gained credibility through its ideological alignment with the “PayPal Mafia” around Trump: Musk, his AI and crypto adviser David Sacks, Peter Thiel and Roelof Botha, grandson of apartheid foreign minister Pik Botha.
The groundwork was laid in 2018, the same year Stavropol made its offer. AfriForum toured the US and was photographed with John Bolton; that August Trump tweeted about “the large scale killing of farmers”; and in Australia, Peter Dutton floated fast-tracking visas for white South African farmers (Böll Foundation).
The story lands so easily in America because the ground was prepared half a century ago. In the 1970s the Rhodesian government advertised for volunteers in Soldier of Fortune magazine, whose founder Robert K. Brown backed the white-minority regime (Wikipedia), while segregationists and the early religious right lobbied Washington to recognise it (Wikipedia). The historian Gerald Horne estimates that hundreds, if not thousands, of white Americans fought for Rhodesia (The Conversation).
Since its fall, Rhodesia has become a “lost cause” for the American far right. Dylann Roof wore its flag on his jacket and called his website The Last Rhodesian before murdering nine Black worshippers in Charleston in 2015; slogans such as “Rhodesians never die” circulate with it (ADL). The rebel army’s bush camouflage, the Rhodesian Brushstroke, rode the same revival. The US Marine Corps rated it among the three best patterns ever tested in 2000, which gives it cover in mainstream gun culture (Wikipedia), while one Canadian surplus store built a business on reproductions, down to brushstroke yoga shorts, amid a resurgence of Rhodesia nostalgia among white nationalists (Ricochet). Errol Musk’s farm colony and Washington’s refugee flights sell into that same imagination.
South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies calls the “white genocide” idea completely false, and prominent Afrikaners have refused to be “pawns in America’s culture wars” (GlobalSecurity). Russia cannot match Washington’s numbers. Its offer is symbolic: the same persecuted-farmer story, sold to the same audience, with Elon’s father as the salesman.
In June the whole cast converged on the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia’s showcase “Davos”, held from 3 to 6 June 2026. Its foreign guests included Candace Owens, on a panel about “traditional values”, the actor Steven Seagal, Scott Ritter, former German chancellor Gerhard Schröder and Rodney Mims Cook Jr, chairman of the US Commission of Fine Arts; Andrew and Tristan Tate posted from Moscow the same week (CNN, Al Jazeera, Kyiv Independent). Errol Musk reportedly attended too (Independent via Yahoo).
Sasha was not just in the audience. She met Owens, “my inspiration since forever” (post), confronted the BBC’s Steve Rosenberg on the floor (post), and on 6 June spoke at the forum herself, on “international dialogue in an era of growing censorship” (post). Nine days later, on 15 June, she announced that the EU had sanctioned her.
Owens is a thread back to Britain, and to Part Four. She was Turning Point USA’s communications director from 2017 to 2019. In December 2018 she and its founder, Charlie Kirk, were introduced at the London launch of Turning Point UK, at the Royal Automobile Club, by John Mappin of Camelot Castle, the man Kirk told donors to talk to (BuzzFeed News, HOPE not hate). Turning Point UK’s first chairman was George Farmer, son of the Conservative peer Lord Farmer, whom Owens married in 2019 (Wikipedia).
Readers of Part Four know Mappin: he is in a mutual follow with @ivan_8848 and has traded posts with Dmitriev on X. Anna Paulina Luna, the congresswoman who follows Sasha and whose ties to Dmitriev Part Four examined, was Turning Point USA’s director of Hispanic engagement.
Owens and Mappin have both since turned on the organisation that brought them together. Owens has pushed conspiracy theories about Kirk’s 2025 assassination (Wikipedia), and Turning Point UK now insists Mappin never held any position in it (Bartholomew’s Notes). On the SPIEF stage, Owens was selling “traditional values” to the audience Turning Point built.
Errol’s other Moscow guest matters more to British readers. In June 2026 Tommy Robinson filmed himself with Errol in the Metropol hotel and declared that “Russia is not the enemy of Britain” (LBC). Errol later said the Musk Foundation paid for the trip, and Robinson was stopped at Heathrow under the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act 2019 on his return (LBC). That slogan returned three months later as a mass campaign on X.
The private end: Move to Russia
MoveToRussia.com is the commercial counterpart, and it buys British attention. In August 2026 a critic pasted one of its Google ad links into an argument; the link revealed a campaign called ak_search_uk, bidding on the phrase “move to russia”. Its tag container holds a Google Ads account, AW-17789972440.
The firm says it is “Based in Moscow with a Hong Kong office” and names three co-founders (About):
Ilja Belobragin: ex-McKinsey; Stockholm School of Economics; executive master’s from RANEPA, the presidential academy
Dmitry Serebrennikov: Shell, Tele2, Softline and Russian Post; Stockholm School of Economics EMBA
Pavel Dermer: PhD from Bauman Moscow State Technical University; RANEPA executive master’s
There used to be a fourth. From its relaunch in March 2024 until at least June 2025, the About page listed Konstantin Galkin, “Managing partner, co-founder” (archived). His personal Telegram was the firm’s public contact until October 2024. His bio there, a career in CAD/CAM and IT for fashion brands with a Geneva master’s, matches the LinkedIn profile of Konstantin Galkin, Russia-based Sales Director at Centric Software since 2019.
Centric belongs to Dassault Systèmes, part of the Dassault family empire whose holding company also controls Dassault Aviation, maker of the Rafale fighter (Crain Currency). Dassault Systèmes suspended all new business in Russia in March 2022 (Dassault Systèmes). Yet its Russia-based sales director was co-founding a firm selling Russian residency to Westerners, and his LinkedIn does not mention it.
The firm runs a family of domains from one server, 64.27.63.131: movetorussia.de, movetorussia.fr, movingtorussia.com (bought after years on sale at HugeDomains) and nowokevisa.com. All share its contact address and Telegram channels. nowokevisa.com and sharedvaluesvisa.com were parked on the same day, 6 September 2024, 18 days after the decree. sharedvaluesvisa.com, which styles itself an “Official Pathway to Russia”, sat on Move to Russia’s hosting account in October 2025 but now runs separately.
Its Telegram channel echoes the region. In March 2026 it pushed a Nizhegorodskaya Pravda piece insisting Westerners do not move “for Kremlin money” (post). In July it said its clients had refused BBC interviews, calling the BBC “a propaganda arm of the British state” (post).
The movement and the medals
The cast share a stage, a movement and, in one case, a state medal. On 29 November 2024 TASS hosted the launch of the “Welcome to Russia” movement, promoted in advance by OKA (OKA). The speakers:
Alexander Stefanesko, founder of Ruspatriation, who posts as @Frussien and writes as Alexandre Latsa (Le Débunk Café). He sells a €147 course on retiring in Russia.
Alina Lipp, whose own bio says the EU sanctioned her, and whom OKA congratulated on Russia’s state Pushkin Medal (OKA).
Martin Held, founder of the “Moya Rossiya” NGO.
Sabrina Hare, of a Texan family that moved to Ivanovo.
The movement’s figurehead is Maria Butina, now a Duma deputy, and she has done this before, in reverse. She went to the US as a gun-rights activist and, close to the Russian central banker Alexander Torshin, worked her way into the National Rifle Association and conservative circles in the run-up to the 2016 election (Moscow Times, The World). In December 2015 she took an NRA delegation to Moscow, including former president David Keene and incoming president Pete Brownell, and at the NRA’s 2016 convention Brownell introduced her to Donald Trump Jr (CNN, Everytown).
Her American guide brought his own southern African history. Paul Erickson, the Republican operative who was Butina’s boyfriend and helped pressure Brownell onto the Moscow trip, was executive producer of Red Scorpion (1988), Jack Abramoff’s anti-communist action film (IMDb, Talking Points Memo). It was partly financed by apartheid South Africa and shot in South West Africa, now Namibia, then under South African rule (Wikipedia); Erickson later lobbied for Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. Apartheid South Africa’s anti-communist propaganda and Butina’s NRA campaign share at least one producer. Erickson was never charged over Butina, but in 2019 he was indicted for wire fraud and money laundering in an unrelated investment scheme (RFE/RL via GlobalSecurity).
Arrested in 2018, she pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of Russia, was sentenced to 18 months and was deported in October 2019; in 2019 she said she had been honoured to help, knowing Torshin passed what she gathered to Russia’s Foreign Ministry (RFE/RL via GlobalSecurity). A report by the Senate Finance Committee’s Democratic staff later called the NRA a “foreign asset” (PBS).
Now she recruits in the other direction. Her Welcome to Russia team of about a dozen helps foreigners get the visa; “LGBT and migrants”, she says, are the two main reasons people move (Newstalk ZB). She also sold houses: in late 2024 she promoted Dobrograd’s “turnkey resettlement program” with a paid-click tagged link (post).
Sasha moves in the same circle. Novaya Gazeta Europe reported her at a Butina gathering of relocated Westerners in January 2025 (Novaya Gazeta Europe). The pilot of the Moscow-based show Russia Up Close, in November 2025, had three guests: Sasha, Butina and Pinneker.
On X they behave like a team. Butina follows Tim Kirby, Frussien, Gonzales and Home in Russia; nine of the 16 relocation accounts we mapped follow Sasha; and between a quarter and a half of each one’s newest followers also follow her.
Back to Britain
The relocation pitch and September’s “Russia is not my enemy” wave draw on the same people. Of the 3,679 accounts in our RINME dataset that posted the slogan, 615 follow Sasha, about 17%. Of 126 control accounts, one does. Ten of the campaign’s 15 hub accounts follow her.
She did not start it. 466 nationality-template posts came before her own “I am American and Russia is not my enemy!” at 19:11 UTC on 24 September; @dhulqarnayn786 was posting “I’m Polish and Russia is not my enemy” on 9 August. When the Finnish researcher Pekka Kallioniemi pushed back, she replied: “Not my fault people copy my tweets for views.”
The wave did bring her British followers. Among her 300 newest followers, 19% are placed by X in the UK, against 5% of older ones. The slogan’s British phrasing had been road-tested in June, when Tommy Robinson, now one of the campaign’s hubs, told cameras in Errol Musk’s company that “Russia is not the enemy of Britain”.
The same line runs through the Netherlands. The Russian Embassy in The Hague posted “Russia is not an enemy of the Dutch and European PEOPLE” on 1 September, and on 25 September declared itself “impressed by the ‘Russia is not my enemy’ flash mob”. A Dutch GP with 103,000 followers retweeted Sasha’s “warms my heart” post on 25 September and posted her own #RuslandIsNotMyEnemy two days later.
At the top of her follows sits Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s special envoy and the central figure of Part Four. They follow each other, and she replied to him twice on 28 September. Among her followers is Representative Anna Paulina Luna, whose links to Dmitriev Part Four also examined.
The same pipes, reused for Aughinish
When Rusal’s Aughinish refinery in Limerick came under fire this year, its small band of defenders on X drank from the same well. Chay Bowes, who says he lives “in Russia, Ireland, and the World”, was the account the 73 Aughinish defenders retweeted most, 25 of them; he is also the most-followed account among the 16 relocation accounts we mapped, level with Sasha herself. The relocation crowd’s other favourites reappear too: Tara Reade, whose Russian citizenship Sasha celebrated, amplified Clare Daly’s defence of the plant; @jaccocharite, followed by six of the relocation accounts, boosted both Stanislav Krapivnik and Daly; and the Russia-based journalist Brian McDonald, who said the bill for Ireland’s review “would be paid in jobs”, is followed by four of them.
Sasha follows the defence’s engine room: Bowes, Krapivnik, Gerry Nolan’s Islander, @rinalu_ and the fake Russian “Spetsnaz 007”, whom @TheDarkFacts retweeted into the Aughinish row. Bowes and George Galloway, the defenders’ two most-shared voices, are both followed by Dmitriev, as Part Four showed. Yet no Russian state account posted about Aughinish at all. Moscow did not need a campaign: the same standing network of relocators, commentators and aggregators carries whatever the moment needs, from moving house to defending a refinery.
What the data shows
The evidence shows a state agency using bloggers by design, and Sasha as one of its named channels.
Shown: OKA is a Nizhny Novgorod government body with a defence-staffing remit.
Shown: OKA organised Sasha’s factory trip and tracked her as
sasha_jost.Shown: Galkin was listed as a Move to Russia co-founder for about 15 months.
Shown: Move to Russia ran a UK Google Ads campaign in August 2026.
Shown: 17% of RINME slogan posters follow Sasha.
Shown: Errol Musk says the Musk Foundation paid for Robinson’s trip.
The take-up is small. Around 3,300 people applied for the Shared Values visa between September 2024 and March 2026 (London Globe), and OKA claims nearly 100 arrivals. The product is less the migrants than the story they let Russia tell about the West.
Sources and archived evidence
Data: Sorsa API sweeps of @sashameetsrus, six orbiting accounts and 27 relocation-niche accounts (September 2026); the RINME dataset; Wayback Machine, crt.sh, urlscan and WHOIS records; public Telegram web previews. Archive every link below on archive.ph before publication.
Archived pages
OKA Telegram posts: 1 · 6 · 36 · 183 · 217 · 339 · 356 · 358 · 442 · 539 · 983 · 1035
Move to Russia Telegram posts: 1 · 310 · 351
Reporting
History and the Shared Values visa
The US Afrikaner programme and the Rhodesia myth
SPIEF and Turning Point
Butina, the NRA and Paul Erickson
Dassault