Russia’s Anti-Woke American Cannon Fodder
Sometimes, life plays the cruelest jokes on those who refuse to live in the real world. The true tragedy is that their decisions often end up impacting the people around them. It’s one thing to go down the conspiratorial rabbit hole — it’s quite another to drag your children down with you and endanger their lives.
Derek Huffman is a name few recognized before several weeks ago. An American man from Texas, Huffman moved to Russia in 2025 with his wife DeAnna and three of his daughters. His mission: to save his family from “wokeness” and the “LGBT propaganda” in American education and mass media. At first, everything went relatively smoothly. Huffman even launched the Huffman Time YouTube channel, where he promoted himself as a pro-Kremlin blogger and praised his new life in “traditional” Russia. Then the Russian government used Huffman’s naïveté and sent him to the front lines in the Ukraine war.
Despite having no military experience, Huffman signed a contract with the Russian army in May. He had been promised a safe job as a welder. “No fighting,” they said. After all, he was their American poster boy. But in a hardly shocking turn of events, the Russian military lied. Just a few weeks later, Huffman was sent to the front lines.
Derek Huffman vlogging in Russia, 2025. Source: The Telegraph.
His wife took to social media to beg for help, explaining that her husband had been misled and deployed into combat with minimal training and without understanding the language. None of the family speaks Russian, which means Huffman likely couldn’t even comprehend his military training. Her pleas fell on deaf ears.
And in a cruel twist of fate, it was anti-LGBT bigotry that brought Huffman to the battlefields of war-torn Ukraine. Hatred doesn’t only imperil those it’s directed toward, but also those who harbor it.
It all began with Tim Kirby — a long-time Putin supporter from the US who has lived in Russia since 2006 and now hosts a show on the Kremlin-aligned Radio Mayak. He made a name for himself by parrotting state propaganda and telling Russian audiences how bad life in America is. Kirby’s dream was to build an “American Village” in rural Russia — a haven for those who reject the liberal values of the modern West. Many conspiracists see America as a decaying, decadent, and degenerate dystopia in which the government is deliberately trying to poison the minds and bodies of children via pop culture, the media, medicine, technology, education, and the food supply. To these maverick thinkers, their idealized view of Russian life is often seen as preferable to Western culture because it feels more "natural” and “traditional.”
“I was working on a documentary about a US-born priest who converted to Orthodoxy and moved to the Yaroslavl region,” Kirby recalled in his interview with the Russian opposition outlet Novaya Gazeta Europe. “His name was Joseph Gleason. Now he’s Father Iosif. We became friends. He told me how many people write to him, asking how to move here. I said, ‘Same here!’ And that’s how the idea came about — to build an American Village.”
This is the project that Derek Huffman joined.
According to Kirby, the main appeal of Russia is the lack of what he calls “LGBT propaganda” — something he claims is now everywhere in the West: “in ads, in video games, even in schools, where children are taught to see it as normal.”
Putin’s decree “On Providing Humanitarian Support to Individuals Who Share Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values” provided a convenient legal framework for Kirby’s vision. It also gave a green light to conspiratorial Americans who are somehow under the impression that denying human rights to gay, bi, and trans people will lead to more “freedom.”
In his videos, Derek Huffman ironically praised “Russian safety”, claiming that “strict laws” help to fight criminality, and expressing gratitude to President Putin for new opportunities and security.
New arrivals to the “American Village”, located near the Russian town of Istra by the outskirts of Moscow, are given special exemptions from some of the usual requirements placed on immigrants to Russia. For example, they don’t have to pass Russian language or Russian history exams. In a country like Russia, autocratic authority can rewrite basic rules. At first, this may feel like a strange privilege — until one remembers Derek Huffman’s fate and recognizes the American Village for the scam it is.
Americans come chasing a dream: a new life in a traditionalist utopia where they will be celebrated as heroes for fleeing “woke America.” Who would have thought that in the 21st century, American citizens would trade the American Dream for a Russian Nightmare? The problem is, Mother Russia doesn’t need heroes. She needs cannon fodder — new crops of men to be delivered into the meat-grinders in Ukraine. Russia has used human-wave tactics in war for nearly a century, especially during WWII. It’s a strategy that prizes the relentless intensity of sheer troop numbers over precision or the preservation of soldiers’ lives. Sending wave after wave of expendable troops in hopes of overwhelming the enemy is made possible by Russia’s mass mobilization. The challenge is keeping the military perpetually replenished with fresh bodies. Any soldier in the Russian army can potentially become pawns in this crude and wasteful strategy, which is one reason why desertion rates are so high.
This situation is made all the more precarious for people like Huffman. If you don’t speak the language, you can’t ask for help. You can’t resist orders. You can’t even understand the rules. You become, in essence, a victim of human trafficking, except the traffickers are propagandists, bureaucrats, Orthodox Church leaders, and generals.
The most devastating part of Huffman’s story is the children involved.
Derek and DeAnna Huffman have six children. Their three eldest sons — 22, 21, and 20 — remained in the US. The three younger kids — all teenage daughters — were taken with them to Russia. The family claimed they left America because their daughters were being “force-fed LGBT propaganda.” What exactly that meant, Derek has never quite managed to articulate. In a video about their move, recorded before the Russian army all but kidnapped him, Huffman went through a vague list of culture-war grievances: “All the cartoons these days are about sex and gender.” “We couldn’t accept our daughters growing up in a world like that, and the food in America is really unhealthy too. They want us fat, stupid, and easy to control […] I don’t want my girls turning into zombies.”
According to Novaya Gazeta Europe, the family first tried to find a “traditional” life within the US, moving from Arizona to Texas in search of a more conservative environment. But the “propaganda,” they claimed, found them even there. They pulled their daughters from school and began homeschooling them to shield them from any mention of sex, sexuality, or gender identity. When that didn’t help, Derek started looking abroad — and stumbled upon Tim Kirby’s American Village.
Now, their daughters are indeed free from rainbow flags — but not from the risk of losing their father, nor from being exploited by the very system their parents believed would protect them. Their fate is unknown. Their voices have been erased. They are the forgotten victims of their family’s anti-LGBT bigotry. This is what “child safety” looks like to anti-LGBT activists.
Meanwhile, DeAnna has been pleading for her husband’s safety:
“Unfortunately, he feels like he is being thrown to the wolves right now, and he is kind of having to lean on faith.”
She also reported that Derek and other men in his unit were forced to “donate” 10,000 rubles for their own supplies — a sum that took a substantial cut from his already modest paycheck. Online rumors of Derek Huffman’s death appear to be untrue, but that can change at any time.
As someone who lived in Russia for years, I can say that none of this surprises me. In an undemocratic authoritarian society that denies the rights of minorities, no one is safe. Not even those who “embrace tradition” or the most abject and obsequious loyalist. In regimes like Russia, the individual has no value and is thus fundamentally expendable. The state will sacrifice anyone — gay, bi, straight, cis, or trans. It’s a lesson these American Villagers are learning the hard way.
Published July 30, 2025
