A group of Kremlin critics who have fled Russia are calling on EU countries to accept more Russian opposition figures. The focus should be primarily on skilled workers to weaken Russia’s war economy.
“One less engineer, that’s one less missile flying towards Ukraine,” former Russian opposition member Dmitry Gudkov said on Tuesday at the presentation of an investigation into Russian exiles in Paris. Together with the economist Vladislaw Inosemtsev, he founded a think tank that, together with researchers from the university in Nicosia, Cyprus, conducted a survey of Russian exiles in France, Germany, Poland and Cyprus.
According to the survey’s organizers, 80 percent of the 3,200 respondents fled abroad after 2014, the year of the annexation of Crimea. Nearly half of that 80 percent only left the country after the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022.
“Exodus of qualified specialists”
Most refugees are said to be well educated and support Western values. That is why a broad-based campaign for ‘economic immigration’ from Russia makes sense. “Part of the strategy to undermine the Putin regime should be an orchestrated exsanguination,” the study authors write. The “exodus of qualified specialists” and their resources could weaken the Kremlin more effectively than existing sanctions. There are also sectors in Europe where there is a shortage of skilled workers.
Source: Krone
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