The videos showed up on my timeline a few days ago, and I couldn’t look away. A white man with a Russian accent and broken English, walking up to African women in Ghana and Kenya, asking their names, making small talk. Within minutes, they were leaving with him. The footage, shot from his perspective through what looked like ordinary glasses, moved from public places to private apartments to intimate encounters. Everything recorded without their knowledge, everything uploaded to a paid Telegram channel.
Social media exploded. Not just outrage about the violation, though that was there too. Something else, something very uncomfortable. The comments from African men poured in: “These same women we chase for months, and this guy gets them in just minutes? With broken English?” People started writing about poverty and desperation. Jokes, shame, finger-pointing everywhere. And underneath it all, the question nobody wanted to say out loud: Why did so many women say yes so fast to a complete stranger just because he was white?
By the time I started digging into the story, the man – known online as Yaytseslav – had already fled both countries. Ghana summoned the Russian ambassador, talking extradition. Kenya activated security agencies. Governments were moving, but he was already gone. What he left behind was worse than the videos themselves. He left behind a mirror, and nobody liked what they saw reflected back. I know I didn’t.
Let me be clear; what this man did was criminal. Non-consensual recording of intimate moments is a violation, full stop. The women in those videos are victims of a predator who used technology and trust against them. That’s not up for debate. But there’s another conversation happening alongside the rightful anger, and that’s the one I need to have. Because this isn’t really about him. It’s about us.
I watched one of the clips that went viral. Not the intimate footage. I refused to participate in that violation. But I watched the approach videos, the ones showing how he met these women. He’s walking through a public area, sees a woman, walks up to her with his thick accent. “Hello, I am from Russia. What is your name?” She smiles and they start chatting. His English is rough but she’s friendly, responding to his questions. Within minutes, she’s agreeing to meet him later, or go with him right then. Different women, same pattern. It looked easy… way too easy. And that’s what broke the internet.
The debates that followed split along predictable lines. Some African men were furious, but not always for the right reasons. “Our women failed the test,” some said. “They made us look bad.” As if the issue was national pride rather than exploitation. The women clapped back: “Maybe if you treated us better, we wouldn’t be attracted to foreigners.” Round and round it went, everyone pointing fingers, nobody wanting to sit with the real discomfort.
Then came the poverty arguments. “These women are desperate,” people said. “The economy is hard. They see a foreigner and think opportunity.” There’s truth in that, I won’t lie. Economic hardship makes people vulnerable. But here’s what bothered me; not every woman in those videos looked desperate. Some were well-dressed, clearly middle class. Some had jobs, some were even married. This wasn’t just about poverty, it was about something deeper, something we’ve been carrying for generations without naming it.
There was one video that stood out to everyone. A woman he approached who shut him down completely. She was getting something out of a nice car, well put together. He tried his usual approach, asked for help with getting a Bolt ride. She started to help, polite, trying to be kind. Then he shifted into his pickup routine and her whole demeanor changed. She looked at him like he was insulting her intelligence. She saw through him immediately.
That’s when I understood what we were really looking at. It wasn’t just about poverty or African men treating women badly. It was about something we don’t like to admit; we still see white skin as a passport to something better. Opportunity, status, a way out, safety even. He didn’t have conventional charm (at least not to me). His English was broken, he had no money to flash around in those initial conversations. What he had was white skin and a foreign accent, and it looked like for many of the women who said yes, that was enough.
This is the part that makes us uncomfortable. We want to believe we’ve moved past colonialism, that we’ve decolonized our minds and know our worth. But then a white man who admits he doesn’t speak English well walks through African cities and shows us we haven’t. We watch our sisters, our daughters, our friends light up at the accent, at the possibility of what he might represent. Not him as a person because they don’t know him, but what he symbolizes: abroad, escape, a different life. The same reason so many of us are in diaspora right now, chasing Europe, chasing America, chasing anywhere that isn’t home.
I thought about the woman who rejected him. What made her different? Was it just that she had money, that she’s well traveled? Or had she learned what many of us only discover after we migrate: that the fantasy of the West, of whiteness, of foreign saviours, is exactly that, a fantasy. That white men are just men, that Europe has its own problems, that running toward something because you’re running away from yourself never ends well.
We carry colonialism in our bodies whether we admit it or not. It’s there in the way we still call Europe “abroad” like it’s the only abroad that matters, in how we describe someone as “been to London” or “schooled in America” as credentials that automatically elevate them. It’s in our beauty standards, our language hierarchies, our ideas about what success looks like. And yes, it’s in how a white foreigner can walk through our cities and women follow him.
The women in those videos are victims twice over; first of his predatory recording, and now of public judgment and exposure. They didn’t deserve either. But their violation doesn’t erase the uncomfortable question… why did it work so easily? We need to talk about the colonial programming that’s still running in our minds, the programming that makes us see whiteness as a ticket somewhere better. Because until we name it, until we see it clearly, we’ll keep falling for it. And men like him will keep exploiting it.
