THE FLIGHT FROM PUTIN: RUSSIA IS LOSING PEOPLE ONE SUITCASE AT A TIME
from QUORA
THE FLIGHT FROM PUTIN: RUSSIA IS LOSING PEOPLE ONE SUITCASE AT A TIME
The most revealing thing about Russia right now may not be what people are saying. It is what they are packing.
Suitcases are leaving. Plane tickets are being bought. Passports are being renewed. Apartments are being transferred to relatives. Georgia, Armenia and Serbia are again appearing on Russian maps not as tourist destinations but as escape routes. There are no gigantic lines at the borders like those seen after Vladimir Putin announced the partial mobilization in September 2022. This time the movement is quieter. More calculated. People are leaving before they have to.
That distinction matters.
Russia is not experiencing a second 2022 exodus on the same scale. It is experiencing something more insidious: a population learning to anticipate the next shock.
The immediate fear is another mobilization.
The Kremlin says there will be no such thing.
Putin has repeatedly dismissed the rumors, calling them nonsense and describing them as an information attack designed to create anxiety before Russia's parliamentary elections. He has insisted that there is currently no scenario requiring a new mobilization.
And Russians are doing something perfectly rational with that reassurance.
They are buying plane tickets anyway.
That is the peculiar political economy of a country where the official version of reality and private expectations increasingly travel on separate tracks. A government can say there is no mobilization. A citizen does not have to believe it. He only has to remember what happened the last time the Kremlin said it had no plans for one.
In September 2022, Putin announced a partial mobilization of 300,000 men. The announcement triggered panic and a rush for the exits. Four years later, the memory has not disappeared. It has become institutional knowledge.
This time, men of military age are preparing in advance.
Some have already left. Others have bought tickets that can be used if the situation changes. Some are considering temporary stays abroad. Others are making arrangements for their property and families. Support organizations assisting Russians who fear conscription report a marked increase in inquiries. Kovcheg, which helps Russians abroad, has described a surge since the summer, while its founder told Le Monde that August inquiries were roughly ten times higher than earlier in the year.
That is not the same thing as mass flight.
It is something subtler.
It is preparation for flight.
And preparation itself is a political fact.
The war has also become harder to keep at a psychological distance.
For years, the Kremlin could present the conflict as something happening somewhere else, to someone else, while ordinary Russians continued their daily lives. Ukraine has been steadily attacking targets inside Russian territory with drones, and the intensity of those attacks has increased dramatically.
Between June and August 2026, more than 43,300 Ukrainian drones were intercepted over Russian territory and occupied Crimea, according to Russian authorities cited by the Associated Press—nearly six times the number reported during the same period the previous summer. The attacks disrupted oil refining, warehouses, airports and other infrastructure, while fuel shortages and flight cancellations brought the war into ordinary routines.
The war is no longer merely a television picture.
It is a sound in the sky.
It is an airport that closes.
It is a gasoline shortage.
It is a refinery that stops producing.
It is an Internet connection that suddenly disappears.
It is a window that someone now wonders whether to reinforce.
And it is the uncomfortable realization that geography is no longer an adequate shield.
Sochi was supposed to be a resort. In September, sea-drone attacks injured eight people and damaged part of the city's beachfront infrastructure. The city is also home to one of Putin's official residences.
Even the Kremlin's geography is changing.
Putin recently moved the Valdai Discussion Club meeting from Sochi to Moscow because of concerns over Ukrainian drone threats. The decision was not presented as a dramatic retreat, but the symbolism requires no interpreter: a president whose government has spent years projecting military power abroad is increasingly obliged to calculate where it is safe to hold a conference inside his own country.
Then there is the economy.
The Russian economy has not collapsed. That is important, because lazy journalism often confuses deterioration with collapse. Russia continues to produce, export and finance a war machine on a massive scale.
But resilience is not prosperity.
Inflation remains above 6 percent, borrowing costs are extremely high, labor shortages are persistent, and military spending is absorbing an enormous share of state resources. Ukrainian attacks on refineries have further complicated an already strained energy system. Reuters reported this week that six major Russian diesel-producing refineries—representing roughly half of the country's diesel production—had reduced output or halted operations following drone strikes. Moscow responded by restricting fuel exports.
This is what prolonged war does to a society.
It does not necessarily produce one spectacular economic catastrophe.
It produces friction.
More expensive goods.
Fewer workers.
Higher borrowing costs.
Fuel problems.
Interrupted business.
Reduced investment.
A future that becomes harder to calculate.
And eventually people begin asking the most brutally practical economic question of all:
Why stay?
For some Russians, the answer has nothing to do with politics in the ideological sense.
They simply want to avoid the army.
Others want to protect their careers.
Some are alarmed by restrictions on the Internet and the growing reach of the state into private life. Others are activists, members of opposition movements or people whose personal circumstances make remaining in Russia increasingly difficult.
The result is a strange coalition of emigrants.
Pacifists.
Technology workers.
Young families.
Political activists.
People who simply do not want to fight.
People who fear being ordered to fight.
And people who have concluded that the country in which they built their lives no longer offers the degree of personal freedom they once considered normal.
They do not necessarily agree with one another.
They do not need to.
A country can lose citizens without producing a single unified political opposition.
People do not always leave because they have chosen another ideology.
Sometimes they leave because they have chosen another life.
That may be the more serious problem for Moscow.
A government can replace a soldier.
It can replace a bureaucrat.
It can replace a television presenter.
Replacing an educated worker who has decided to build his future somewhere else is considerably more complicated.
Russia is already struggling with labor shortages. Businesses report difficulty finding skilled workers, while demographic decline and wartime uncertainty compound the problem.
Every departure therefore carries two stories.
One is personal.
The other is national.
The personal story is a man standing at a railway station with his luggage, leaving behind parents, friends, a home and a language that will remain his even if the country does not.
The national story is a state increasingly forced to ask whether the people most capable of leaving are precisely the people it can least afford to lose.
And then comes the Internet.
Russia's authorities have increasingly restricted access to online platforms and services, often citing security concerns linked to the war. For Russians whose jobs depend upon international communication, the restrictions are not an abstract question of civil liberties. They are a professional obstacle.
The state says security.
The citizen hears isolation.
The distinction becomes harder to maintain when the same government that tells people the country is stable keeps tightening the boundaries around what they can see, say and access.
That is how political systems lose credibility—not necessarily through one spectacular lie, but through the accumulation of small contradictions between official reassurance and private experience.
The Kremlin says there is no mobilization.
People prepare for one.
The Kremlin says Russia is winning.
People buy tickets out.
The Kremlin says the economy is resilient.
Businesses complain about inflation, labor shortages and high borrowing costs.
The Kremlin says restrictions are necessary for security.
Workers discover that those restrictions make their lives and jobs more difficult.
None of these contradictions, individually, proves that Russia is collapsing.
Together, they describe a country under increasing pressure.
And the pressure is no longer confined to the battlefield.
It has entered the kitchen, the gas station, the airport, the office and the smartphone.
That is why the current Russian exodus deserves attention even if it never becomes a spectacular stampede.
The decisive question is not how many Russians have crossed a border this week.
It is how many have begun planning the crossing.
A mass exodus is visible.
A society preparing to leave is not.
By the time everyone starts running, the important decision has already been made.
Cesio Endrizzi
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