They register panic of purchases in Russia after increase in inflation and sanctions 2:57
(CNN) --
"How to get out of Russia?"
Google searches for this term in Russian reached a 10-year high within the country a week after the invasion of Ukraine on February 24.
From Moscow to the Siberian oil capital of Novosibirsk, and from the intellectual hub of St. Petersburg to the nuclear submarine base of Murmansk, Russians search for a way out in anticipation of a bleak future in a country torn apart by isolation, censorship and belligerence.
The bodies of Russian soldiers accumulate in Ukraine, while the Kremlin hides the true balance of the war
Analysis of search data, immigration figures and flight information, as well as interviews with experts, activists and people inside the country, shed light on how people who can no longer live in Vladimir Putin's Russia are trying to flee amid the president's war in Ukraine and political repression at home.
Russians' interest in the "emigration" topic on Google quadrupled between mid-February and early March.
Searches for "travel visa" have nearly doubled, and for a Russian equivalent of "political asylum" more than five-fold.
Looking to emigrate in the past 30 days, Australia, Turkey and Israel were some of the top destinations in fashion, along with Russia-friendly Serbia and Armenia, as well as Georgia, which Russian troops invaded in 2008.
advertising
It is difficult to establish exactly how many Russians have actually left the country or how many might.
Financial constraints, skyrocketing travel prices and limited availability of outbound routes after a cascade of flight suspensions risk ensnaring those fed up with Putin's Russia.
“On February 24 everything changed, our lives were divided into a before and an after,” said Veronica, a 26-year-old digital marketer who lives in Moscow.
She gave a pseudonym to protect her identity.
He didn't want to make a hasty decision as he watched his friends and acquaintances abruptly pack their bags, break leases and "go to Yerevan, Tbilisi and Istanbul, along with their pets," days after learning Russia had attacked Ukraine. .
Instead, he went to anti-war protests in the Russian capital.
Ukrainians do not trust Moscow's promise to withdraw 2:24
But in early March, Veronica began to realize that the situation was getting worse.
"The police started to take the activists directly out of her apartments, to take people out of the subway," she told CNN, adding that the police came to her parents' house in Siberia to threaten her.
Russia passed new legislation in early March that can send people to prison for up to 15 years for publishing or sharing information about the war that authorities deem false.
They even made the use of the word "war" illegal, Veronica said.
However, the last straw for her was the reaction of the general Russian population, which, according to her, largely "believes in television propaganda".
According to a recent independent poll, 58% of Russians support their country's military actions in Ukraine and only 17% believe that Russia has initiated the escalation of the conflict with Ukraine.
“I was yelling that it was time to protest, go to rallies, write complaints to agents – instead people went shopping on the last IKEA business day,” Veronica said.
"I don't want to live with people like that, they broke my heart."
Veronica and her partner began a desperate search to get out of Russia.
"No matter where we go, we just want to escape," she told CNN.
An anti-war protester holds a banner during a demonstration in front of the former Russian embassy in Tbilisi on March 12.
In a recent speech, Putin called Russians who do not support him "traitors" and called his departure a "necessary self-purification of society [which] will only make our country stronger."
“Any people, and even more so the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors, and just spit them out like a mosquito that accidentally flew into their mouths, spits them out on the pavement,” the Russian said.
the president said.
However, the exodus of activists, human rights defenders and political leaders from Russia is an important and noticeable trend, according to Egor Kuroptev, director of the Free Russia Foundation in Georgia.
“The country is occupied by a dictator.
Independent media is destroyed.
Social networks, such as Facebook and Instagram, are blocked.
There are new crackdowns on activists,” he told CNN, attesting that those who remain are now under threat.
One way ticket from Russia
Political persecution is just one of the reasons some Russians try to escape.
In addition, some families do not believe that the situation inside the country will improve, they are worried about their children's possible recruitment into the army or they want a Western education for their children, according to Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Nikolai, who is being identified by an alternative name for his protection, is only 16 years old.
In early March, his parents made the difficult decision to send him to Tbilisi, Georgia, to join his older brothers who were already there.
They want him to apply for political asylum in Europe afterwards.
"In the first days of the war, all my friends and I went to protest and hundreds of people were arrested," Nikolai told CNN.
“The police stop people on the streets, people who are just walking, going to stores, and they ask to see their phones, their Telegram and social networks and then the police take them and arrest them,” he said.
Nikolai's mother waited almost a week hoping the conflict would calm down, but on March 2 she told him to get a covid-19 test and bought him a one-way ticket to Yerevan, Armenia for the next day. .
"It wasn't an argument, it was like, go now," she said.
From there, he shared a taxi to Tbilisi with other travelers.
Russian oil tankers disappearing from the map: what is happening?
"A lot of people came here when the war started," he told CNN, adding that he has met friends he didn't even know were in the Georgian capital.
"You go to buy something for dinner, you go into a supermarket or a shop and you hear Russian words and you see Russian faces. In cafes, everywhere. It's also a new reality for Georgians."
Since the start of the war and as of March 16, more than 30,400 Russians have entered Georgia while more than 17,800 have left, meaning more than 12,600 were in the country at the time, according to the interior minister. from Georgia, Vakhtang Gomelauri.
This is almost 14 times more Russian immigrants than in the same period in 2019 before the covid-19 pandemic, he said.
Furthermore, almost 10 times more Belarusians have arrived in Georgia since the war broke out compared to 2019, when tourism was still high, according to Gomelauri.
latest planes
Georgia is one of the few countries that are affordable and accept fleeing Russians without lengthy visa procedures.
Other options include post-Soviet countries, such as Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan.
Those who can afford it go to what are often popular vacation destinations, countries like Turkey, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico.
There have been no direct flights to Georgia since the Russian invasion in 2008. But for a host of other destinations, Flightradar24's analysis of CNN data has revealed a notable increase in daily flights from Russian cities in the first two weeks of the war. .
Daily departures to Armenia increased by almost a third compared to the winter average: as many as 34 planes left Russia for this country of less than three million people on March 6.
Daily flights to Kazakhstan and Israel have grown by around 50%.
Turkey, Uzbekistan and the United Arab Emirates have seen an average of one, three and four additional flights per day, respectively.
OPINION |
Russia's days as an energy superpower are coming to an end
It is not clear how many people who took direct flights to neighboring countries would stay there and how many would try to reach Europe, the United States and other Western countries.
Those who were quick enough (and had the Schengen visas that made it possible) jumped on the last planes bound for the European Union (EU) in the early days of the war.
Flightradar24 data shows an increase in flights to several European countries, including Cyprus, Spain, Finland and Hungary, in the days before airspace closures.
But options are rapidly shrinking, and many of those routes that are still open are unable to operate due to carriers' sanctions-related inability to obtain insurance or aircraft leases.
Among others, the airlines in two important potential destinations for Russians, the Kazakh airline Air Astana and Turkish Airlines, suspended all operations with Russia in mid-March.
In the winter months before the war, more than 210 airlines served Russia internationally, but by early March that number had dropped to just under 90, according to data from Flightradar24.
Flight operators fly to no more than a third of foreign airports previously connected to Russia, data from early March shows.
"Almost impossible to get out"
Veronica said that she and her partner have already spent 260,000 rubles (about $2,500) on plane tickets that had been canceled and not yet refunded.
"First we bought plane tickets to Yerevan for March 5 with the Russian company s7, but it was cancelled. Then we bought tickets to Yerevan with a Russian airline Aeroflot for March 8, but that flight was also cancelled. After that we bought from the Turkish airline Pegasus, a plane to Istanbul for April 1, and today we learned that it was also cancelled," he told CNN.
Attempts to cross land borders are also problematic, as Russia banned its citizens from leaving the country by land in 2020, officially due to the coronavirus pandemic, with only a handful of exceptions.
"Now it is almost impossible to leave the country," said Veronica.
"If there are plane tickets, they are too expensive for us. We are very afraid."
Police officers detain a man holding a sign reading "No to war" during a demonstration against Russian military action in Ukraine, at Manezhnaya square in central Moscow on March 13.
Arshak Makichyan and Apollinaria Oleinikova, a married couple who are activists living in Moscow, also found it difficult to leave.
They told CNN: “People are massively buying tickets to Armenia.
Tickets now cost five times as much as they did before the invasion.
For many people this is not affordable.”
Oleinikova continued: "There are some options to go out by bus and train. Now [it's] very difficult to get a visa. You need to have a vaccine, but here you can only get vaccinated with [the] Russian vaccine. You can't buy foreign currency. That's why there are big difficulties".
Russia's Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine is being widely used in several countries and has been administered to millions of people around the world, but the vaccine has not yet been approved by the World Health Organization.
This makes travel to many EU and US countries even more challenging for those who have been vaccinated.
As fleeing Russia becomes an even more expensive task, it is clear that it is mainly the young, well-educated and well-paid who can afford to leave.
For Russia, that is very much the tech class.
Some international information technology (IT) companies had been relocating employees in the months before the Ukraine invasion, anticipating financial and reputational damage.
Most IT workers, especially freelancers, have the benefit of being able to work remotely and only require a bank account and a work permit.
Within days of the invasion, several social media groups emerged where colleagues or dissidents from Russia and Belarus shared information about possible escape routes.
Just one of the dozens of groups dedicated to relocation has reached more than 100,000 subscribers, with almost half of them online daily.
Tens of thousands of people have joined groups dedicated to moving to specific countries, such as Armenia, Georgia and EU countries, as well as groups of IT specialists who discuss opportunities and how to find work abroad.
People in the terminal of Moscow's Sheremetyevo International Airport on March 8.
An IT professional, Vasiliy, 32 (also identified by a pseudonym for his security), left Belarus after President Alexander Lukashenko allowed Russian troops to use the country as a springboard to attack Ukraine.
"I chose Georgia because it doesn't require a visa, it allows you to register as self-employed, open a bank account and receive your salary," he told CNN.
"I also feel safe in Georgia because many of my friends have also moved here. Tbilisi is now a mini-Minsk."
However, he does not think that all of them would stay in Georgia, as he noted that many use the country as a transit zone before trying to get an EU visa.
However, the age and condition of those leaving Russia have raised questions about what this flight means for the country's future.
"Leaving Russia is a privilege," said Anna (whose name has been changed for security reasons), a 23-year-old Muscovite now living in Georgia.
"In fact, there is a wave of immigration of smart, educated, kind and empathetic people [from] Russia."
The fact that Russian dissidents are now being expelled from the country could make it even more difficult for any change to filter through to society in the months and years to come.
A protester at the March 12 rally in Tbilisi.
This is unlikely to worry the Russian president.
"Putin doesn't care about the brain drain, he only cares about his regime," said Kuroptev of the Free Russia Foundation in Georgia.
"It's helpful for him to get rid of dissidents and make everyone shut up and freak out."
"He [Putin] doesn't understand that the people who are leaving right now are the best people in Russia," added Oleinikova, who is 18 and also trying to leave her native country.
"[They] are scientists, journalists, IT people. Those are the smartest people and they're all leaving because it's too dangerous to be here," he told CNN.
"I hope that people will come back and build a new future for Russia."
Graphics by Natalie Croker and Marco Chacon. Illustrative photo by Gabrielle Smith
Russian invasion of Ukraine
