EU urged to welcome skilled Russians to ‘bleed’ Putin regime

PARIS: A group of exiled Kremlin critics on Tuesday urged EU countries to do more to welcome Russians fleeing Vladimir Putin´s regime, arguing that a shortage of skilled workers would deal a blow to the country´s war-time economy.

According to some estimates, up to one million people have fled Russia since Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022 but some of them have begun returning back, discouraged by the scarcity of available jobs and difficulties getting visas and long-term residence permits, in countries like Turkiye but also in the European Union.

“One less engineer is one less missile flying in the direction of Ukraine,” Russian opposition politician and former lawmaker Dmitry Gudkov said in Paris.

Speaking at the French Institute of International Relations, Gudkov unveiled a study of the Russian diaspora in several EU member states, one of the first attempts to study the Ukraine war-triggered exodus. Conducted by researchers associated with the University of Nicosia on behalf of a new think tank co-established by Gudkov and the economist Vladislav Inozemtsev, the study is based on a survey of over 3,200 Russians living in France, Germany, Poland and Cyprus.

Nearly 80 percent of respondents left Russia after 2014, the year Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine. Of them, 44 percent fled after the full-scale invasion.