Wise move, good luck with your girl friend at home!
I wish some of the twits in here would wise up, Ukraine women/FSU women not for every men just as much as most Western men don't do it for them either..for the few it may work, for the majority it won't and your wasting your time and money and exposing your heart to defintive heartbreak and disappointment!
The grass is not greener in the Ukraine or FSU than it is in your western home..in fact its quite frosty!
Joel....hope things work out for you....would appreciate you re-reading your post here. You were given some very good info in regard to your girl-very possibly not sincere-but you tried to make it work....still think there was something shady from beginning. Like many stories here, as it gets closer to a meeting, things seem to get clearer. Anyways, maybe this is for the best!!!
This kind of reminds me of a person I know, Richard aged 56 and an architect/internal designer..he meet a girl called Svetlana a few years ago who was from Ukraine over the internet, aged 28( she was from Bride.ru agency, very sceptical site that is full of scammers mixed with some real girls ) there was over 20 years age difference, she was model quality with a young kid ( actually she came across as the image of a slut ) while he is showing his age and not the most handsome thing on the block but financially successful, he was going to meet her after a few months of writing but on the suggestion of the planning of the meeting, Sveta's e-mails became funny and odd, she did not write much any more, letters became few and far between and the whole thing went cold and he called it off and quit the internet MOB business as he lsot interest in it.
My spiel on this is only the Ugly and poor girls want to leave Ukraine, ( these are the ones you will rarely find on dating/agency sites and are like the fish John West reject as far as agencies concerned but these are good people but not stuff agencies can make money on so they don't put these profiles up, theres no money to be made and men won't sign up/pay for e-mail to any agency full of plain Janes and uglies! ) the good looking model quality ones you see on some sites are either scammers, professional daters or not serious and can easily find a rich man in there own country or have boyfriends/husbands already and are players or agency bait or trolls out to get kickbacks from the agencies throough commissions on fake letter writing or membership fees..for most part this is not real and don't be blinded by a sexy attractive model quality profile you find on some agency sites...99.9% of the time its fake.
The free internet dating sites are very risky too, these are full of scammers.
If you go to Ukraine without a plan, use no agencies like some men advocate here and expect to meet a woman in the street or night club there and you don't speak the local lingo, I think thats very risky and stupid too...its a far fetched idea, like me expecting to go to town one day, expecting to meet a woman in the street and have a root and get married..it won't happen, its like trying to play the lottery and expecting to win first prize amongst millions of entries with cahnces of winning of 1 chance in 10 million.
Any way you slice it, this FSU mail order bride thing and personal visit business is very risky..do it if your game and got money to burn and time to waste but don't expect to come out of it with the prize of a woman you want willing to leave her country and all she has ever known for you!..expect to do multiple trips and meet different women like some of the guys do here before you find success and spend multiple thousands on it in pursuit of a dream that is not likely to perpetuate to reality! ..and write about it in here, the story of pile full of failures mixed with one success in a blue moon!
ps: its not the fault of men here or elsewhere, the FSU women are of equal or greater fault ( probably greater because they sign up to agencies and have no idea of western men and there true values or no real concept of it, life in the west, only a stereotyped image they get from US style T.V shows which gloss everything over, make life appear perfect and that the streets are paved in gold! ) and on the measure of success, its not when she gets her fiance visa, its when she marries you and marriage outlasts the waiting time to get a green card or permanent residence and she is still with you!
Took 8 pages of nonsense to figure out this girl wasn't real. When most of us figured it out after the first paragraph. Though some guys, like Joel here will try to convince us that we are crazy and don't know what we are talking about. Then there are guys who have never been there and say all are scammers. Just too funny sometimes what I read here.