---
type: Country
title: Russia
description: Harry's observations from sanctioned Russia — FSB border interrogations, cash-only life for foreigners, jammed GPS, banya culture, and unexpected warmth.
tags: [russia, europe, sanctions]
timestamp: 2026-07-12T12:00:00Z
---

# Russia

Harry began a Russia series in [Moscow](/places/moscow.md) in 2025, with an
18-hour train journey to the south teased next — his stated aim, as usual,
to separate the country from its government.

## Observations

### From [I Ignored Western Media and Went to Russia 🇷🇺](/videos/IEMZb82wD0k.md)

- **Getting in**: hard. UK citizens need a visa via the London consulate,
  and Harry spent nearly five hours at the border — airport security, then
  FSB questioning, then a 30-minute phone search (his Ukraine visit was
  visible on it). His approach: total honesty from the start, which he
  believes is why they let him in. YouTubers risk being treated as
  journalists.
- **Money**: foreign bank cards are completely unusable under sanctions —
  exchange cash and carry it; locals themselves are nearly cashless.
- **Sanctions life**: some 28,000 sanctions (from video – unverified) mean
  no Western brands in malls and a parallel Yandex app ecosystem (maps,
  taxis, delivery, hotels). GPS across Moscow is deliberately jammed as a
  drone defence, breaking navigation for everyone.
- **Internet**: Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube are blocked, and WhatsApp
  calls had recently stopped working; locals use VPNs, while a foreign
  roaming eSIM bypasses the blocks entirely.
- **Safety**: Moscow's petty crime is very low — Harry and locals rate it
  safer than London — but even the FSB advised caution in Chechnya and
  Dagestan.
- **People and culture**: warmth everywhere despite expectations; a tough,
  no-complaints mentality Harry admires. Russia spans 11 time zones with
  about 190 ethnic groups, is roughly 70% Orthodox Christian (little
  practised by the young), and Moscow is the melting pot. Banya culture —
  extreme heat, birch whipping, ice plunges, naked socialising — is a
  national institution.
- **Dating**: courtship is traditional — 101 roses for a serious first
  date, the man pays — per Harry's local friend
  [Valeriya](/people/valeriya.md).
- **Soviet memory**: her grandparents recall rationing, bread queues, and
  four-hour sausage runs to Moscow — remembered with fondness for the
  togetherness. Isolation cuts both ways today: Western visas for Russians
  have become far more expensive and restrictive (from video – unverified).
- **Money and costs**: airport taxi 2,200 rubles.

### From [Entering the Side of Russia You Don't Ever See 🇷🇺](/videos/OgY_LeUShM8.md)

- **You have to leave Moscow.** Harry's stated position is that the capital
  tells you nothing about the country, and the trip is built on getting into the
  countryside by train and by thumb.
- **Russians have to be won over**, and he treats that as a feature. They keep
  to themselves, don't smile at strangers and may be suspicious of a foreigner —
  which he calls travelling on high difficulty and contrasts with India, where
  he says the friendliness is almost too easy. A conversation that starts here
  feels earned.
- **Long-distance trains are extraordinary value and run on time.** Roughly what
  a one-hour Birmingham-London ticket costs buys 18 hours here.
- **Third class is the one to book** — Harry's reason is that it's where
  anything happens — and no food comes to the seat, though there's a restaurant
  car and a bar.
- **The war reaches the interior.** Volgograd was bombed the night before Harry
  hitchhiked out and every flight was cancelled; he is told the air defence
  intercepts everything and that after two years nobody reacts. A man he meets
  had lost his job when the local oil refinery was destroyed. *Obs: Harry
  repeatedly refers to "the thing I can't talk about", dating it to 2022, and
  never names it on camera; the bundle records it as he does.*
- **The regions are not one country in any visible sense.** Kalmykia, a day's
  travel south, is Buddhist, and Harry says the people look Mongolian and the
  development level drops sharply.
- **Rural Russia is empty** — flat steppe, no wildlife, near-desert for hours at
  a stretch.
- **KFC operates as Rostic's** since the Western brands left.

### From [I Traveled to the Russian Republic No Tourists Visit 🇷🇺](/videos/5W7JY6CKw08.md)

- **Russia contains whole nations that look nothing like it.** Kalmykia is
  Buddhist, its people descend from a Mongolian nomad tribe, and it is one of
  190 ethnic groups in the country.
- **Stalin deported the Kalmyks wholesale** to Siberia on an accusation of Nazi
  sympathy; many died on the week-long journey and only about 100,000 came back
  after his death.
- **The minority republics are poor and emptying.** Kalmykia is among the
  poorest in Russia and its young leave for Volgograd and Moscow, which Harry's
  host names as the real threat to the culture — not politics.
- **Nationalist violence against non-Slavic Russians was serious in the 1990s**
  and, per the same host, has eased: Moscow is more open, and a Russian passport
  and fluent Russian settle the question.
- **Hospitality, once you're inside a home, is total.** Guests are fed on
  arrival, refusing food is rude, three shots is the expectation for a man, and
  Harry was not permitted to pay for anything all day.
- **The gift combination for a Russian household** is vodka, sweets and sausage.
- **Soviet flats** were allocated by the state and stay in families for
  generations; bathroom and toilet are separate rooms.
- **On Russians being cold** — Harry's most careful verdict anywhere in the
  bundle. He says the stereotype is true and refuses to soften it, then argues
  that coldness is not unkindness: a long winter, a hard history, very few
  foreigners, and wariness of outsiders that he calls normal in most of the
  world. His host's version is that Russians are slow to trust, permanent once
  they do, and direct enough that you are never shown a face put on for you.

### From [I Went to the Most Feared Place in Russia - Chechnya 🇷🇺](/videos/mcDuqVPzdfY.md)

- **The people who warned him hardest were Russians.** Every Russian Harry told
  he was going to Chechnya was alarmed, many said they would never go
  themselves, and the FSB officer who interviewed him at the airport asked why.
  What he found was a spotless, heavily policed and — his own word — slightly
  boring city.
- **The autonomous republics run their own affairs.** Chechnya has its own
  leadership and rules close to but separate from Russia's; Harry's
  understanding, flagged as possibly wrong, is that its autonomy is the greatest
  of any republic.
- **Sanctions land unevenly**, and hardest at the edges: in Grozny it is cash
  only for foreigners, no SIM cards, no Yandex at all, and counterfeit versions
  of the Western chains — while some international brands operate normally.
- **Distance is not a consideration.** An eight-hour drive is treated as routine;
  Harry paid 18,000 rubles for a seven-hour taxi across two republics and rates
  it good value.
- **Internal borders are barely policed** — heavy army presence at the Chechen
  boundary and no passport check.
- **Health outcomes are highest in the Caucasus**: Dagestan first in life
  expectancy in Russia, Chechnya second, in republics that don't drink or smoke.
- **The economy of enlistment.** Passing a recruitment billboard in Kalmykia,
  Harry notes carefully that some people sign up to support their families and
  buy their parents a house — and frames it through the expectation, common
  across the East, that children support their parents rather than the reverse.
  He does not name the conflict.