Grim economic prospects, mandatory mobilization and an unsuccessful war have created this mass emigration. Estimates for those who left in 2022 alone are a half million. Observers describe this group as consisting mainly of young professionals, in many sectors, who were impelled to leave immediately after Russia’s Ukraine invasion on February 24, 2022. Some put the current total of those that fled at one million.
But the new wave of the desperate abandoning their homeland actually began in 2021, the year that an autocratic regime intensified its suppression of the opposition and its social infrastructure. During that year, some 1,500 activists and journalists left Russia, destined mainly for Georgia, Ukraine and Lithuania. The size of this exodus in 2022 is unknown, but the activists themselves put it at several thousand, with now the main country of choice being Germany.
