Go and spend summer in Russia, it is the perfect antidote. St. Petersburg is amazingly beautiful! Museums, architecture, cultural performances, no morbidly obese people on streets, no graffiti, even metro is nice!
Regiojet.com has daily trains from Krakow to Kyiv, with guaranteed connection at UA border. It takes about 14 hours and 50 euro. Or dozens buses every day, but you will have to wait for several hours at border (train skips queue).
An areal photo during the winter isn't very fair to the city. Looking around on street view during the summer months it doesn't look nearly as bad. A bit run down, but that's common for nearly all ex-soviet cities.
Magnitogorsk has nice weather in summer. Some green parks, decent public transport. But not that much fun, westerners usually prefer university cities. It has very nice surrounding nature.
Polution is ok I guess (India and China were far worse from my experience). It is not industrial shithole as OP suggests. Factories were cleaned up over 30 years. And smoke stack are quite high and leave smoke in high atmosphere. And most of them use natural gas anyway...
There is 2.5 hours walk through on youtube: "Magnitogorsk, Russia. Metallurgic Capital and Steel Heart of Russia. Ural Trip 1".
> Magnitogorsk has nice weather in summer. Some green parks, decent public transport. But not that much fun, westerners usually prefer university cities. It has very nice surrounding nature.
Sounds like a lot of western cities honestly. Most are okay places to live, but not exactly happening, overly fun places.
I'll be honest I expected a lot worse when looking on street view, but I looked around a bunch of places and was like "I could live here".
> There is 2.5 hours walk through on youtube: "Magnitogorsk, Russia. Metallurgic Capital and Steel Heart of Russia. Ural Trip 1".
Winters are brutal and quite depressing. All sorts of blood leaching insects in summer. Some people have alergies to clouds of pollen... And Russian administration was challenging even before the war.
I am nomad, it is part of my rotation. Very nice place for couple of weeks at right time of year. (not Magnitogorsk specifically)
(Actually I'd rather visit Kyiv but I've heard that now's not a good time.)