Russia's Brain Drain

VILNIUS, Lithuania (AP) — Russia’s tech workers are looking for safer and more secure professional pastures.

By one estimate, up to 70,000 computer specialists, spooked by a sudden frost in the business and political climate, have bolted the country since Russia invaded Ukraine five weeks ago. Many more are expected to follow.

For some countries, Russia’s loss is being seen as their potential gain and an opportunity to bring fresh expertise to their own high-tech industries.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has noticed the brain drain even in the throes of a war that, according to the U.N. refugee agency, has caused more than 4 million people to flee Ukraine and displaced millions more within the country.

This week, Putin reacted to the exodus of tech professionals by approving legislation to eliminate income taxes between now and 2024 for individuals who work for information technology companies.

Some people in the vast new pool of high-tech exiles say they are in no rush to return home. An elite crowd furnished with European Union visas has relocated to Poland or the Baltic nations of Latvia and Lithuania.

A larger contingent has fallen back on countries where Russians do not need visas: Armenia, Georgia and the former Soviet republics in Central Asia. In normal times, millions of less-skilled laborers emigrate from those economically shaky countries to comparatively more prosperous Russia.

Anastasia, a 24-year-old freelance computer systems analyst from the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, chose Kyrgyzstan, where her husband has family.

“When we heard about the war on (Feb. 24), we thought it was probably time to leave, but that we might wait and see. On February 25, we bought our tickets and left,” Anastasia said. “There wasn’t much thinking to do.”

Like all the Russian workers contacted for this story, Anastasia asked to remain anonymous. Moscow was cracking down on dissent even before the invasion of Ukraine, and people living outside Russia still fear reprisals.

“As long as I can remember, there has always been fear around expressing one’s own views in Russia,” Anastasia said, adding that the war and “the background noise of patriotism” made the environment even more forbidding. “I left one day before they began searching and interrogating people at the border.”

The scale of the apparent brain drain was laid bare last week by Sergei Plugotarenko, the head of the Russian Association for Electronic Communications, an industry lobbying group.

“The first wave – 50,000-70,000 people – has already left,” Plugotarenko told a parliamentary committee.

Only the high cost of flights out of the country prevented an even larger mass exit. Another 100,000 tech workers nevertheless might leave Russia in April, Plugotarenko predicted.

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