Russia's New Brain Drain

Putin’s actions have the country’s best and brightest heading for any exit they can find

- By Leonid Bershidsky

In Kyrgyzstan, a member of parliament urgently called on the government to start creating jobs and setting up temporary housing for the information technology professionals now arriving daily from Russia. Even a poor Central Asian nation that exports cheap migrant labor for Russian construction sites and fast-food restaurants looks like a safe haven to thousands of educated Russians fleeing the cataclysm Vladimir Putin created by invading Ukraine.

This can no longer be described as brain drain: It’s a stampede for the exits. Konstantin Sonin, an economist at the University of Chicago, has estimated that some 200,000 Russians fled in the first 10 days of the invasion—to Kyrgyzstan, Armenia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, Israel—any country that admits Russians visa-free. That’s a small number compared with the 2.8 million refugees who’ve left Ukraine, but then Russians, as citizens of the aggressor nation, don’t need to run for their lives.

These are mostly people with lots to lose: homes, cars, comfortable incomes, and savings that are difficult to extricate from Russian banks because of tight capital controls. They are leaving everything behind, most of them because they want nothing to do with Putin’s sham-imperial project and don’t want to be associated with his war crimes; others because they cannot imagine living under the Soviet-style autarky to which Western sanctions have doomed Russia.