Russian tech executive Ilya Krasilshchik hurriedly packed up three suitcases and boarded a flight to Dubai this week with no plan and no idea what would come next. All he wanted was to leave a country “flying into an abyss”, he said.
Krasilshchik is one of tens of thousands of Russians who have fled the country in recent days, seeking to escape the spiraling effects of President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, from western sanctions imposed in response to the war to the Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent.
“The country that we lived in has been destroyed. What future is there for a country where chekisty have seized power?” he told the Financial Times, referring to the Soviet word for security services. “I believe such a country has no future. All it can do is survive.”
The wave of emigration, if permanent, will prove a significant long-term drag on an economy already hit by EU and US sanctions that have crippled its stock market and currency and cut it off from western financing, officials and analysts have warned.
With almost all European airspace closed to Russian aircraft, flights to Tel Aviv, Istanbul, Yerevan, Baku and Tbilisi have been sold out for days, while other travelers have packed onto buses to the Baltic states.
Konstantin Siniushin, a Latvia-based Russian tech investor and co-managing partner of The Untitled Ventures fund, found that demand to leave was so high — and exit routes so oversubscribed — that he chartered a plane to take people out.
“The first week [after the war began], people were in shock. The second week, people started getting out fast and it was a madhouse,” said Siniushin.
He filled the 160 or so seats on the March 3 charter flight from Moscow to the Armenian capital Yerevan within 24 hours. Most passengers were IT professionals or business people with an international focus.
“The people leaving were those who understood that for them, all this represents a ban on their profession, because they receive income from conducting business internationally,” Siniushin said.