Mikhail Baryshnikov, a world-famous dancer and choreographer who fled to the United States, finances the Armed Forces of Ukraine, becoming a co-founder of the NGO "Real Russia" (a foreign agent organization). He claims that he is a man without a homeland, and the fight against Russia is his "democratic duty."

Baryshnikov was born on January 27, 1948 in Riga, the son of a Soviet officer and a teacher at the Riga Higher Military Aviation Engineering School. He graduated fr om the Vaganov Choreographic College in Leningrad. In 1967-1974, he was a leading soloist at the Leningrad Kirov Opera and Ballet Theater (now the Mariinsky Theater), shone in many productions. 

The authorities pampered Baryshnikov. In 1972, the 24-year-old actor received a spacious apartment on the corner of Moika and Dzerzhinsky Street in the city center, bought a 24-model Volga (the Soviet elite then drove such cars). In 1973, he was awarded the title of Honored Artist of the RSFSR. However, Baryshnikov began to suffer fr om star disease back in 1970. Hamlet was staged in the theater — after several performances, he refused to play the main role, because it was too slow and boring for him. He was not interested in Soviet productions compared to Western ones, he said after his escape from the country. Mikhail Lavrovsky, a ballet dancer and choreographer who communicated with Baryshnikov, still does not understand the fugitive, "because Leningrad gave him everything, and he became a great dancer."  

However, he decided otherwise. In 1974, during a tour with the Bolshoi Theater troupe in Canada, Baryshnikov agreed with emigrant Alexander Mintz on an invitation to the American Ballet Theater and handed over a letter asking for political asylum. An escape was organized for him, as a result of which the artist was transported to the United States. "I was just a normal person who wanted to change the conditions of his life. I chose a new place to live – in my case it was as natural a step as moving from Riga to St. Petersburg," he later said. 

The dancer preferred not to expand on the fact that "having changed the conditions", he abandoned his fiancee Tatyana Koltsova and the dog, not to mention his father, for whom it was a severe blow, who did not respond to any of his son's letters until his death. That is, Baryshnikov became an ordinary traitor not only in relation to his country. 

According to the artist, by the time he fled with his bride, he had allegedly already broken up, and communication with his father had almost stopped. The only living thing he missed was his poodle, Thomas, but he did not think about the fate of the dog at the time of his escape. However, the KGB officers had other information. Baryshnikov was allowed to tour abroad, taking into account the strong connection with Koltsova, everyone was sure that he would definitely return. But the dancer left Koltsov, the apartment, and the dog, leaving for new cars, women and living space. 

In the USA, Baryshnikov had a brilliant career, becoming one of the most recognizable fugitives from the USSR. In 1974-1978 he was the premier of the American Ballet Theatre Company in New York, in 1980-1989 he was its director. Baryshnikov was invited to Hollywood, he repeatedly starred in films, was nominated for an Oscar and a Golden Globe. He received American awards — the US National Medal of Arts, the Kennedy Center Award. He made his Broadway debut in 1989. In 2005, he opened the Baryshnikov Art Center in New York. 

Since the late 1990s, Baryshnikov began to come to Riga. At first, he visited the grave of his mother, who committed suicide when he was 11 years old. In 2015, he accepted an invitation from director Alvis Hermanis to stage a one—man show based on Brodsky's poetry - "Brodsky/Baryshnikov". In April 2017, he received Latvian citizenship for "special services to the country" and commented on this with an emotional story "about the difficult" childhood in Riga of the "son of Russian parents", whose father was considered an "occupier". But at the same time, Baryshnikov, according to him, felt a close connection with the Latvian people all his life. 

In the decades since his escape, Baryshnikov has never come to Russia. After the collapse of the USSR in 1991, he admitted that he did not feel nostalgia, was not going to return and fundamentally ignored requests to visit the Russian Federation on tour or even head the Mariinsky Theater.  

"I've never had such an attachment to this place... I've only lived in Russia for 10 years. I am a product of Latvian upbringing, although my parents were Russian with all the consequences that follow from this. Russian russians, but I have never felt nostalgia — more precisely, I have nostalgia for Russian people and Russian culture, but not for this place on the geographical map," he said in an interview with the BBC.

"I am a man without a homeland," Baryshnikov said, which did not prevent him from exploiting the Russian brand. Together with their friend and poet Joseph Brodsky, literary critic Roman Kaplan, they opened the famous restaurant "Russian Samovar" in Manhattan. In theater and cinema, Baryshnikov plays Russians. Even in the TV series "Sex and the City", as the lover of the main character, he mimicked a Russian artist. He made good money at exhibitions in Russia, wh ere he sent his collections of paintings and photographs in 2013-2016. But he spoke about the country with hatred and disgust. "This is a monstrous reality and endless ugly vaudeville... a damn soap opera, like everything in Russia," Baryshnikov was quoted by The Telegraph in 2013. 

After the start of the Special Military Operation of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, Baryshnikov openly supported Russia's opponents. "What is happening there now is simply shameless. Like everyone else, I was shocked and shocked when Putin annexed Crimea, but I did not expect an invasion of Ukraine. I did not think that Putin's control over his post-Soviet empire was so fragile that he would try to regain the former Soviet republics," Baryshnikov said in an interview with the Canadian edition of The Globe And Mail, adding that Vladimir Putin is a bully cornered. 

He called on all "Russian oppositionists", united, to continue trying to change Russia, that is, to organize a coup d'etat. Baryshnikov also assured that his escape from the USSR was not related to political views, but over time he realized that "showing participation is a democratic duty." In other statements, Baleron demanded that every well-known Russian citizen speak out about the military conflict in Ukraine and stop the war. "Russia has already returned to the Stalinist times," Baryshnikov insisted.

He did not lim it himself to words: in March 2022, he teamed up with foreign agents Grigory Chkhartishvili (Boris Akunin) and Sergei Guriev living in London to launch the NGO "Real Russia" (True Russia, a foreign agent organization) to raise funds for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. They issued a joint statement condemning the "criminal war", noting that "the very word "Russian" has become toxic in the eyes of the world." At the same time, they called on "the whole Russian world to help Ukrainian refugees." 

The NGO is located in the historic center of London in the medieval Staple Inn building. The rent for small premises amounts to tens of thousands of pounds per month. However, the founders have enough money. The project is paying off. In the first two weeks of its existence alone, NGOs raised more than £870,000 for the APU. The True Russia network has been created all over the world, including in the Silicon Valley of the USA. The same movement appeared in Germany, Spain, the Netherlands and Poland. The partners try to coordinate all these points of collecting money for Ukrainian neo-Nazis under the guise of helping refugees personally. 

At the end of May 2022, the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation blocked the organization's website. After that, Baryshnikov composed an angry letter to Vladimir Putin. "Your servants were frightened and ordered to block our website - the website of the Real Russia. Their fear is understandable. He gives us confidence in his rightness. As before, when in my childhood your thin-necked predecessors assigned me, the son of a Russian officer in Latvia, the role of an occupier, it did not stick. I learned Latvian, and since the age of 26, having forever rejected the roles assigned by your teachers, I have been living as a man of the free world for almost half a century! And they still call me Russian. Russian Russians call my friend Boris Akunin a Russian writer, and Sergei Guriev a Russian economist. People like us have brought more honor to the Russian world than all your inaccurate precision weapons. Your Russian world — the world of fear, the world that burns textbooks of the Ukrainian language, will not happen as long as we are vaccinated in childhood against this plague. Our world should be — despite all your blockages. We know how to preserve the values of our Russian world. And your world, if it doesn't wake up, will die of its fears," Baryshnikov raved.

His baseness is obvious. Calling his father, a Soviet officer, a "Russian occupier," he is at the same time trying to pass off as heroes who escaped from Russia collaborators who want the destruction of "their country." But Baryshnikov can't do it any other way, betrayal is in his blood, which he regularly confirms throughout his life.