The Texas man who fled to Russia to escape LGBTI indoctrination ended up on the Ukrainian front lines.
His family lives in a village near Moscow that wants to welcome pro-Russian Americans.
MoscowDerek and DeAnna Huffman are a couple from Texas who decided to emigrate to Russia in mid-March so their three daughters could receive an education away from liberal values. "We started thinking about it two years ago because of the LGBTI indoctrination of the children," he explains in one of the videos the family regularly shares on their YouTube channel. "Now we feel very fortunate to have moved away from what was disrupting our daughters' lives and trying to turn them into something they weren't," she adds.
A few months after settling in the new country, Derek believed that a good way for the entire family to obtain Russian citizenship would be to join the army. "If I put my body on the line to defend Russia, I'll have earned a place here, unlike migrants in America, who don't assimilate and want free handouts," he asserted, while repeating the Kremlin's arguments to justify the invasion of Ukraine. "I believe in the Russian cause. They're doing what they deserve. They've been persecuting, bombing, and killing the native Russian population."
According to DeAnna, when Derek enlisted, he was promised he would serve far from combat zones and would work as a reporter or welder. However, everything quickly went wrong. In a video that the family has since deleted, the woman pleaded for help because her husband had been unexpectedly sent to the front lines and, furthermore, he hadn't been able to receive proper military training because he doesn't understand Russian. "He feels like he's being thrown to the lions," she lamented.
A month later, the Huffmans "pray every day" for someone to help them get their father out of this mess, and they need money because they have yet to receive any payment from the Department of Defense. The family declined to comment to ARA, but confirmed that Derek is alive and in good health on the front lines.
A Failed American Town
The mother and children live in Istra, a town about 60 kilometers east of Moscow. There, Tim Kirby, an American blogger who settled in Russia twenty years ago, has been trying to set up what he calls a "American Village", an American town. The idea is to create a haven for compatriots who reject "liberal gender norms" and want to embrace Russian conventions.
The experiment, however, is not going very well because so far only two American families have moved in, one of which has declared them to the Huffmans. Russians have complained about the lack of support from the authorities for their project "Everyone likes the idea, everyone wants to see it realized, but with private money," she explains.
The Huffmans have benefited from a program launched by the Kremlin in September 2024 that offers temporary visas to citizens of hostile states seeking ideological asylum. The list of 48 unfriendly countries includes all members of the European Union, as well as the United States (despite Trump's arrival), the United Kingdom, Canada, Japan, and Andorra. According to the decree, applicants must reject "destructive neoliberal attitudes that contradict traditional Russian moral and spiritual values," but they are not required to have any command of the language or the country's history, unlike economic migrants. During the first seven months of operation, nearly 1,200 foreigners applied for this visa, as reported by the Russian Foreign Ministry at the end of May. Among them, more than a fifth were Germans, followed by Latvians and Americans, who numbered close to one hundred.
The Russian government uses these cases as a propaganda weapon against the West. In February 2024, an Italian student, Irene Cecchini, directly challenged Vladimir Putin at a forum, asking him to facilitate the arrival of migrants who shared Russian values. Kremlin media outlets seized on the anecdote to make it a topic of interest. Maria Butina, a congresswoman who had previously been a spy, oversees the program she calls "spiritual asylum." In a recent interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets, warned: "In Europe, if parents claim there are two genders and refuse to let their children participate in non-traditional neoliberal culture, juvenile justice takes custody of them. Do I need to explain what genders a childless family consists of?"