Brooklyn has a HUGE Russian immigrant population.There are so many ex-KGB that it's called Little Odessa. Plus, I grew up near Brooklyn.
(The Russia Mafia runs most of Brooklyn. It's practically the safest place in NYC )

Odessa is in Ukraine. Are most of these so-called "ex-кгб" actually Ukrainians?

Hey, I didn't name it that. No, the Russian mob is pervasive throughout Southern Brooklyn. The Russian population is curiously Jewish, not Russian Orthodox as I would've thought. My friend Misha lives in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn and he's darker skinned (like Israeli) and his entire family is from St. Petersburg.

And Riga is in Latvia. What's your point?

Eh? Most of the Israeli Ashkenazim I've seen have had rather light complexions. I suppose they may be ever so slightly darker than the average Russian but they're all "white" to me.


Luckily formiko understood.
But don't worry, I'll spell it out specially for you: formiko mentioned that Brooklyn has a huge RUSSIAN immigrant population. Then he added that it's called "Little Odessa". Since Odessa is in UKRAINE it makes little sense to me for it to be used as a nickname for an area known for its RUSSIAN immigrants.

I'm assuming Ukraine is conflated with Russia in the popular imagination of many, especially in the days of the USSR when they were part of the same 15-member federation.

What Talib said, and also consider this map:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map12_b.png

The blue lines represent fluency in Russian and the red lines, in Ukrainian. If you see the area of the city of Odessa (Одеса) you'll notice there's a good amount of speakers of Russian.

Russian is widely understood in Ukraine, especially in the eastern half of the country. Contact between the two languages has led to the emergence of a hybrid known as Surzhyk.

If you knew anything at all about the demography of Ukraine, then you would've gotten my point. Odessa is essentially a Russian city in Ukrainian territory. (And since you didn't understand my reference to Riga, let me spell it out for you: Despite being the capital of Latvia, less than half its population is Latvian-speaking. No prizes for guessing what the most commonly-spoken language in Riga is.)

When I was trying to teach some English to a friend of mine, she translated "todas las perras" into English as "the whole bitch". It was really funny.