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Compulsory military service is a nightmare for Russian citizens, so they choose to go abroad. Photo/Kommersant
MOSCOW – A total of 700,000 to 1.5 million citizens Russia is thought to have fled the country after the attack on Ukraine in February 2022. That was either out of opposition to the war or fear of being sent to the front.
Russian officials are working to lure back hundreds of thousands of citizens who have moved abroad since the launch of the country’s military offensive against Ukraine – but have so far given them little, if any, incentive to return.
For the Kremlin, this mass exodus of mostly young and educated workers is a matter of urgency. Why? That’s because it exacerbated the country’s economic and demographic woes, the latter of which Moscow considers a matter of national security.
President Vladimir Putin claimed in June that half of the Russians who left the country after the start of the conflict had returned, and more of them were still returning.
His speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. Petersburg is pushing officials, such as State Duma chairman Vyacheslav Volodin, to renew calls for citizens abroad to return home.
“Our citizens living in Western countries need to think about where they are going, what they have found and what awaits them,” Volodin wrote on his Telegram channel. Moscow Times. “Considering what happened, it is right to finally start being rational. Today there is an opportunity to return, but tomorrow, because of the hysteria that has swept across Western Europe, (this opportunity) may be lost.”
Pro-Kremlin journalist Alexander Kots published a letter in the Komsomolskaya Pravda tabloid purportedly written by an IT specialist who left Russia for Europe after February 2022, but soon faced Russophobia and a lack of social support. Until recently, the IT specialist described himself as a “liberal”, but meeting a Serbian man who compared today’s Russia to Yugoslavia in the 1990s changed his mind.
“I’m back in Russia, and I’m very happy about that,” the letter’s author — who many speculate is Kots himself — wrote. “I will not leave my homeland again. I will raise my son (or more sons, if God wills) here and will leave all of this to him. And I will not let my homeland down now, believe me.
Despite the calls of officials and attempts at propaganda, no substantial incentives to lure back the emerging Russian emigrants existed.
2023-07-12 16:12:32
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