Held comes from the IT industry and has two companies, Fancy Nerds and Geroy. Geroy is the Russian translation of hero. “We are heroes” is written on the company’s website; Russian telecommunications companies are mentioned as references. But you can’t employ the “heroes”: “We don’t offer anything you could buy and you can’t book any of our services,” it says on the site.
“Voice from Russia” helps “News from Russia”
In an interview, Held says that after the sanctions against Russia he had to make a decision in 2022 – do business in the West or East. He chose East; the Austrian now also has Russian citizenship. The company’s team includes authors and social media managers who are native speakers of German, English and Russian. His technicians have “a lot of experience with Telegram bots, programming, AI, apps, etc….” he writes in his Telegram channel.
It’s called “Voice from Russia”. Held supports the Telegram channels of the German blogger and Russia propagandist Alina Lipp: “News from Russia”, but also various other channels such as “Politics for Blondes” or “Russians & Friends”. And everyone forwards messages from Moya Rossiya to supposedly educate and provide help for Russia. Or to create a mood in the spirit of the Kremlin’s narrative of the corrupt West.
But Held not only has contacts with these channels, Held also has tools. A bot apparently from his forge answers questions on “Welcome to Russia” – and has already done the same for Moya Rossiya. The bot can automatically answer almost any question about Russia, “basically like ChatGPT” – fed with Russian content from the Internet.
140,000 German-speaking people used the bot to answer questions about emigration, “some every day. Complete madness,” says Held in an interview in March 2024.
Moya Rossiya’s own channel has been deleted from YouTube. Held complains that there are “fictitious claims” that they are “part of Putin’s propaganda machine.” In fact, Moya Rossiya offers much more: introductory meetings in Russia and group and language trips to the country. The website, registered in July 2022, arranges flights and hotels – the programming code indicates that commissions are paid for this.
The idea for Moya Rossiya came about in a conversation between him, Lipp and a Russian TV journalist: “We all knew a lot of people who had problems. They had to be helped.” Immigrants in Russia came together for Moya Rossiya, around 15 people. These include employees of his company, who are also listed in the legal notice. The official video of the “Welcome to Russia” performance can be found on his personal YouTube channel; an employee is an administrator at “Welcome to Russia”.
From the bot’s data and Telegram surveys, Held concluded as early as 2023 that more than 30,000 German-speaking users wanted to travel to the Russian Federation. As an expert on the podium at the Saint Petersburg World Economic Forum, he will name the number in June 2023, causing a sensation in Russia. “Europeans are flocking to Russia in search of the truth,” headlines one newspaper.
With Butina, the numbers sound less impressive: According to the migration service, 3,553 people from the West came to Russia through programs from 2022 to 2023, she said at the press conference in November. However, Putin’s decree did not yet exist during this period. And she emphasizes: “It is very important who comes to us, and not how many there are.”
In 2022, a young woman from Frankfurt in Hesse will come to Held in Krasnodar, where he partly lives and where his companies are based, and will be employed by him. In a new channel, she reports on seeking asylum in Russia with her daughter, saying that she fled from “crazy people with sex kits in kindergarten.” The woman doesn’t post anything anymore.
What she tells at the beginning, however, reflects the picture that Foreign Office spokeswoman Maria Sakharova paints of the West in Russia’s largest tabloid newspaper: people “from NATO countries” come primarily out of fear for their children. She claims: “The legalization of pedophilia is already a reality; it is not legally legalized in the West, but de facto accepted.”
This is what Russia’s propaganda is aimed at: early sexualization, LGBTQ, “gender madness.” A former security officer for the Eisbären Berlin ice hockey team was passed on to the Russian media with his story of losing his job: He did not go along with the madness of letting a “woman with a pasted mustache” go into the men’s toilet and stood up against Russophobia (Read more about the case here).
Reality contradicts the emigrant network’s bold numerical dreams: many more people with Russian citizenship or their country of birth, Russia, moved to Germany than in the opposite direction.
The advisors: The Russian model region for immigration from the West is Nizhny Novgorod. There are consultants from Germany there. One of them belongs to Moya Rossiya: Remo Kirsch, who comes from Potsdam, has known Martin Held at least since a Druschba organization trip to Russia. This was founded by current AfD member of the Bundestag Reiner Rothfuß and organizes trips to Russia, and in 2018 – and again in 2024 – to Nizhny Novgorod.
While stopping there, 59-year-old Kirsch chose the area as his future home: Now he wants to build a “German village” on eight hectares of his own land around his house. He regularly talks about this in the Russian media, and in March he received Russian citizenship by decree from President Putin.
Gleb Nikitin, the governor of the Nizhny Novgorod region and student friend of the AfD politician Maximilian Krah, also appointed Kirsch as a volunteer advisor for emigrants in the region at the end of June. He made another German general director of a state agency to support immigrants. This recruitment agency is the OKA agency – one of the three partners of Butinas “Welcome to Russia”.
At the top is Jakob Pinneker, once the Russian boss of Maschinenfabrik Reinhausen (MR), a world market leader for transformer technology. The Volga German moved to Russia with his family in 2016. The company separated from Pinneker in mid-2022, explains the headquarters in Regensburg. Since then, the Russian business has been carried out in accordance with sanctions. And “MR” at Pinneker now stands for Moya Rossiy.
For Butina, Pinneker and the Nizhny Novgorod region are particularly important; other regions in Russia should learn from them. And the region, with its Moscow representation, is also the venue for the first meeting of volunteers from “Welcome to Russia” on December 23rd, with a good two dozen people listening to Butina and Held under the Christmas tree.
On November 20th, Butina attended a meeting with emigrants from the West in Nizhny. Pinneker explains that seven families managed to emigrate with the help of the agency. A month earlier he had welcomed Bublik to a round table.
The lawyer: Pinneker has a co-managing director who is also active at Moya Rossiya and Put Domoj and is often referred to as politician Butina’s “personal advisor”: lawyer Timur Beslangurov (44). With his own company, he helped Western companies with immigration issues, but has “adapted the services to current circumstances since 2022.” This is what it says on the company website, which is apparently on the same server as the websites of Maria Butina and Moya Rossyia. The company is also registered in the same office complex as Butina’s “Welcome to Russia”.
But Beslangurov is also the manager of a farm – out of necessity: with a model Canadian family, eight children and disappointed with the West, things didn’t go so well in Russia with a planned farm after the move – they had already published a YouTube video, like the bureaucracy destroy their dreams. Now, problem-solver Beslangurov is running the farm on paper, and the family can be talked about in Russia’s media again.
Moya Rossiya, together with the lawyer Beslangurov, wants to spare immigrants such problems in the future: There is an all-round, worry-free package with check of all necessary papers and supervised administrative procedures for 290,000 rubles (around 2,7000 euros) for the first person, and it is cheaper for others.
The amplifiers: At the presentation of “Welcome to Russia” the German Alina Lipp sat next to Butina. The 31-year-old wore the newly awarded Pushkin Medal, the highest honor for cultural achievements, which the “courageous journalist” received in November. Lipp has the largest German-language channel for spreading pro-Russian propaganda with more than 180,000 subscribers and is a citizen of the unrecognized Donetsk People’s Republic.
Because she celebrated Russia’s actions in violation of international law from Donetsk at the beginning of the Ukraine war, German prosecutors opened an investigation into her endorsement of a war of aggression – since then Lipp has appeared in Russia as a victim of political persecution. Her German mother followed her to Russia after problems with her bank. According to her own statements, the blogger experienced a lot of the difficulties they had when moving.
She explains that she is often contacted by people from the West who want to emigrate. Moya Rossiya is now taking some of that away from her. In June 2023, Lipp presented the organization to a committee of the Russian Public Chamber, which is supposed to advise the Duma. One million highly qualified people from the USA and the EU could move to Russia, it said.
Many of Lipp’s subscribers are sworn to the young woman. When Lipp spreads messages, they have a significantly greater reach among German-speaking Russia sympathizers. She has sent more than 120 postings about Moya Rossiya in her channel. There are other channels of young women in the Moya Rossiya network, most of whom rave about Russia’s beauties.
They rarely find a good word to say about Germany, where they used to live.
Maria Butina sent a response after the article appeared on December 29: “We were not the ones who created Sodom and Gomorrah in their land,” she wrote, repeating the typical narrative. “Russia is Noah’s Ark for all Christian families who believe in God.” They should move to Russia.