READER NOTICE: Fight Site Staff Member Needs Help Urgently

Statement From Ed Gallo, Editor-in-Chief

If you’re a fan of The Fight Site and are glad it exists, you have many people to thank. Everyone who has contributed is valued and important, but I want to focus on the big picture. The artist currently known as Combat Chronicles founded the site, and I soon adopted a role as managing editor due to my experience. I will not hesitate to tell you that the work I put in from 2019 to 2021 was extremely burdensome and I truly put my weight behind trying to push this project to success. Due to burnout and changing life circumstances, I felt it was necessary to step aside. I trusted the legacy of this site to a small group, but most of all I trusted Tumen with carrying it forward. Quality of work and passion are present in all of our staff, but what I needed most was someone who was driven to have The Fight Site as their livelihood and career. Someone who truly gave a damn, like I did. For over a year, your patronage has supported Tumen and his family. He has earned every penny, I’m very proud and impressed with everything Tumen puts his professional mind to, and even just looking at the community cultivated in our Discord server I see the fruits of his labor. Having done a large share of this work for years, I know what it takes. It is an understatement to say Tumen, and major contributors like Feño, have been busting their asses to keep this thing alive.  

Life happens. Regular people who have done nothing wrong are victimized by geopolitics. It is the cruel truth that surviving these circumstances, circumstances that disproportionately affect those without money, has cost a lot of money. Your patronage, your donations, and significant sacrifice within our staff has allowed Tumen to make great strides toward escaping refugeedom. As I said, it is extremely expensive, and we’re nearing the costliest move of all - immigration to North America.

We need your help more than ever. Please do what you can. It should be enough to appeal to your humanity, but there should also be considerable motivation for you as a fan of combat sports analytical content. If Tumen can get set up in a situation where he is not constantly fearing for his life and separated from everyone he knew and loved, we will be working toward making The Fight Site a real entity - one with actual resources and coordination and staff members who don’t all live in different timezones. Do what you can, tell who you can, and let’s get it done.

Unfortunately due to sanctions imposed on Russian citizens making donations is extremely tricky. So far we’ve been using my PayPal and I’ve been sending him cash at his notice. That’s pretty much the only thing that still works. We also hooked up my PayPal to Tumen’s Ko-Fi account to make the process smoother and quicker. I know it sounds kinda sketchy but genuinely with all the sanctions that was pretty much our safest bet.

You can make your donation by either contributing to Tumen’s monthly allowance by subscribing to our Patreon, where Tumen stil manages to release exclusive content on a semi-regular basis despite everything, or by donating directly to Tumen’s Ko-Fi, which will serve as a basis for his immigration fund.

Again, you can sub to our Patreon at: patreon.com/fightsite or donate directly to Tumen’s Ko-Fi at: https://ko-fi.com/iggytfs. The patreon money contributes to Tumen’s monthly allowance, and the Ko-Fi is the immigration fund. Every penny matters. Thank you.

Below is Tumen’s own statement where he explains his situation in as much detail as he can.

A Plea for Help

Hello. My name is Tumen. You may know me as Iggy.

My wife and I left Russia on March 2, not long after Russia invaded Ukraine and started its merciless war of conquest.

I am of military age and I am eligible for conscription. Now, I don’t think it’s really necessary to explain in great detail why I have no interest in participating in the plot of a tinpot dictator on a power trip. But beyond the simple fact that I hate the Russian government with a visceral, nausea-inducing hatred, I just don’t want to die pointlessly for a cause I don’t believe in.

I had just found the person with whom I wish to spend the entire rest of my life. I found a job that I really enjoy and I became friends with people with whom I share a deep, mutual respect. Things were looking up! Then all of a sudden I was faced with a choice: go along with the party line, kill people who have done nothing to deserve it, pray I don’t get blown to bits, then return home and live with the realisation that I’ve been used like a murder weapon by a government that doesn’t give two shits about me. And then look other people straight in the eye and pretend that’s fine.

But let’s be real here, I would have likely just fucking died.

Or I could run. Grab everything that I could carry, take the love of my life with me, hold on to each other for dear life, and run like hell.

I’ve had enough.

Russia has stolen from everyone. It wanted to steal more. From the Ukrainians, their lives and livelihood, their homes and their land. From its own citizens, much the same — by lying, lying and yet more lying, and by siphoning taxpayer money to send more of its own impoverished citizens to kill and die for no good reason.

Russia has stolen from my people, and me personally, my ancestral land, where nomads have roamed the steppes around Lake Baikal for generations on end. “I have a right to live here,” I thought, “Peacefully, in this place where if you dig deep enough you'll find the bones of my ancestors who founded my family line hundreds of years ago.”

But Russia doesn't respect that.

Russia stole my home from me twice: first by cutting a lump out of Mongolia and naming it Buryatia, and now by making it impossible to live there with either a clear conscience or without fear of persecution and abject poverty by trying to steal yet another piece of ancestral land belonging to a different people. People who merely wished to go on with their lives, speak their own language, and decide their own fate.

And now, after growing up as a second-class citizen and having to put up with the neglect and derision from the Russian government that considered me and my people to be barely-literate yokels for so many years, suddenly it was my “duty” to take up arms and fight against a nation whose people simply wish to be left well enough alone?

I’ve had enough.

So we ran. For the past five months me and my wife have been country-hopping between various places that still allow visa-free entry for Russian nationals. We both left our mothers behind. I had to leave my grandparents behind. My wife left her little baby sister with her mother. I have two cousins in their late teens — two strong clever lads that I’ve helped raise — that are still stuck there because we only had enough money for just the two of us, and every once in a while I get this dream about them getting plucked up by the Military Commissariat and wake up sweating bullets. All we can do is hope they can hang in there and wait the tough times out.

Our parents have plunged themselves into a deep debt to scrounge up just enough to get us out initially. My colleagues from the Fight Site and our subscribers and friends of the site banded together to gather the amount necessary to make sure we have enough money for rent and tickets for the next few months. Their support has been invaluable — literally live-saving.

But that’s just the big moves. We still needed to eat.

So far we have been relying on a monthly allowance taken out of the Fight Site’s patreon fund: 450 USD per month. Due to the lack of activity on my part, the website’s income has been steadily falling over the course of the past several months. The rest of our staff are working their asses off trying to pump out quality content while also having their own real day jobs and lives to sort out. They can only produce so much without overworking themselves. I still do my best to hop in and produce something here and there, but I have much bigger things on my plate right now than combat sports. Things that are so big I try to not think about just how insane this situation we’re going through is, otherwise I’ll freeze up and retreat so far into my own head it’ll kill me as sure as poison. As for the emergency immigration fund our supporters have been able to put together… Well, it’s all dried up.

All this country-hopping and having to rent an apartment after apartment has buzzsawed through our fund like nobody’s business.

I have been able to rent an apartment for a period of three months, so we do have a roof over our heads, but only for so long. Besides, sitting tight where we are now and hoping all will be over soon would be putting us at the mercy of whatever imps kicking around inside Putin’s head are up to at any given moment. That doesn’t sit well with me. I don’t want that. I want a normal life with the woman I love where we don’t have to run or constantly look over our shoulder and police what we say and to whom we say it 24/7.

Right now, we are looking at all possible options for immigration, but that takes time and money, and we still need to pay for all the living expenses, utilities and all that other crap that chews through your budget faster than you can blink in the meantime. We’re both doing our damnedest to find employment, but so far we’ve had little-to-no success. The clock is ticking, we’re still human and we still need to eat, clothe ourselves and repair things if they break. Or God forbid, repair ourselves, but what can you do? Shit happens.

So, here we are. I’m asking for your help. We need any and all possible financial support we can get our hands on, every tiny amount is felt and every cent matters. PayPal no longer works for Russian nationals, most money transfer systems don’t in fact. I’ve finally been able to open a bank account, but for safety reasons I cannot disclose any information regarding it. So far Ed’s been handling all the transactions and making sure the money reaches me on time, and he’s been doing a great job of it. It’s a big responsibility and Ed takes it extremely seriously, and for that I thank him.

So, if you are reading this, and my pleas for help resonated with you in any way, and if you wish to help us, then first of all — you have my sincere gratitude. You are a lifesaver in the most literal sense of the word.

Secondly, we’re going to set up a Ko-Fi for any donations to the immigration fund. If you want details, please reach out to Ed Gallo on social media. Alternatively, you can reach me on Discord. This emergency fund lets us find housing or shelter, travel and otherwise make any big purchases as necessary. This is our primary fund, and this is what allowed us to last up until this point, for five long, long, long goddamn months. Ed has been instrumental in handling all the transactions we’ve been receiving and making sure the money reaches us every single time.

Alternatively, you can simply subscribe to the Fight Site patreon at any of the tiers available and contribute to the monthly allowance that we receive in order to afford all of our living expenses. I really have no other way to say this, but please help us. We just want to find somewhere to settle and lead a boring, peaceful life. I think we can all agree that everyone at least deserves that much.

Fight Site Staff Statements

Christian: Iggy is a great dude and has been one of the most welcoming presences in all of MMA to me, I'm glad to call him my friend. He's one of the strongest people I know and he's incredibly smart and if you have any money to spare he wouldn't take it for granted and I know he would put it to great use in helping himself and his wife. 

Haxx: 99% of this comes down to if you think Iggy’s credible or not.

Go take a look at all the content he has produced relating to MMA - especially on topics others don’t cover, (because they aren’t prepared for the consequences) and you have the answer to that question. 

If you can donate and are interested, he would greatly appreciate your help.

Lukasz: If you already know Iggy, you don’t need us to tell you what’s what, and we hope you can help where possible.  If you don’t know him but you do know me: I’ve known Iggy since before The Fight Site launched in 2019, and worked with him for some years now. He’s a for-real dude who’s been the engine behind the site for a while now, and if you have noticed a change in the Fight Site rhythm in the last few months - yes, this is a good part of why. If you like our work, helping now helps one of the main people behind that - and if you don’t know our work, we hope you might have something to spare to help out someone who took a very real leap of faith not just for himself, but to avoid being a pawn in a war we’ve all been angry about since it began. 

In any case, any help you can give would be welcomed.

Ben: If you’re already a TFS staff member or follow us in some capacity, you’ve already had interactions with Iggy. So whether or not you know him well enough to feel comfortable is not enough. I understand this relies on how much you trust myself and the other staff to vouch for someone you may not know or care about.

Iggy is a good person, his wife is a good person. They are running from conditions I couldn’t imagine and we’re doing everything we can to help. But we need more help.

Please do whatever you can. If you can’t, please share it so others may see and contribute. We know we’re asking a lot, and I wouldn’t be asking for anything if I didn’t think it was to help someone who needs and deserves it.

Thank you if you’re reading this, any of it. We appreciate anything you can do.

Afterword

I know that I am considered by many to be abrasive.

Condescending, rude, self-absorbed — use any adjectives that can be used to describe an asshole, really. I get that. I know that a lot of you will just look at this post where I recound sob story after sob story, and still only see an arrogant piece of shit who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else because he hates fun. There are millions of people suffering across the world that need help way more than me. Hell, there are currently thousands of Ukrainians that are left completely homeless and need food, shelter, clothing and medicine. I wouldn’t hold it against you if you believe that, as long as you actually try to help them. I guess the only thing I can do in response is point at my portfolio and ask you to point out any instances where my anger was caused by anything other than my frustration with the way this sport exploits and ruins people, or how subpar coaching gets promising young men and women hurt in ways that will harm the quality of their life for decades to come. I just want this sport to be good.

Twenty-five minutes to make life fair. Everyone who chooses to put on the gloves and swing leather deserves that much. But this sport is harsh. And so our standards of quality and skill must be harsh, too. Anything less just lets more people get hurt for no good reason.

I love this sport. Being able to discuss my favourite sport, my life’s passion as a job, was a dream come true. I have been hopping from hard labour job to hard labour job for most of my young adulthood, jobs that had long hours and shit pay. The only thing I could afford was booze. For most of my life I never even saw more than two hundred bucks, much less held it in my hands.

Working for the Fight Site is a dream come true to me, and discovering MMA changed my life forever. Being able to learn from some of the most intelligent, skilled and dedicated people I’ve ever met allowed me to grow in ways I never could have imagined. The community we’ve built is proof that there are still so many good people in this world — a lot more than what the lazy cynics and the performative nihilists would like you to believe.

Being able to help fellow martial arts enthusiasts with problems they face in training through my work or by talking to them in our Discord is something that genuinely makes me feel like getting out of bed every morning is worth it. The world is still more good than bad. You belong here. You can do something worthwhile. Leave a print in the sand. It’ll get washed away pretty quick, but it was there for a bit.

But so many things in this sport need to be changed. And caring also means being able to look at something you love and say out loud that it could be better. And I wish to continue trying my damnedest to ensure it happens.

And besides, at this point, does it really matter? I am here, begging you on my knees to save me and my wife, so that maybe at some point, someday, we can also save the rest of our families still stuck in a Russia that is growing more and more totalitarian by the day.

At the end of the day I have my convictions and I stick to them, and my decision to leave my home behind and try to find peace somewhere else is the direct result of these convictions. It could kill me and ruin the lives of the people I love. That’s on me. It’s all on me. If being an asshole online is what ends up doing me in, you might as well put it on my gravestone and write “Keyboard Warrior” instead of my name on it. Hell, to my knowledge it’d be the first time some Internet prick got his comeuppance. It would even be funny in a way.

I mean, to me it would be funny. I always had a really bad sense of humour. I’d look up at the whole thing from below and chuckle. I just don’t think any of my loved ones would get the joke.

Thank you to everyone who decides to donate, from the bottom of my heart. You’re not just going to be bailing me out, you’ll be working towards improving the lives of people I care about.