With the full-scale invasion of Ukraine at the end of February 2022, the already limited civil rights and liberties in Russia has been even further restricted. Hundreds of thousands of men have been drafted and mobilized for the war in Ukraine. Meanwhile, sanctions imposed on Russia have impacted negatively on the everyday economy of Russians. It has been reported that from a couple of hundreds of thousands to a million Russians have fled the country, primarily to Finland, Georgia, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia, and that many more are preparing to leave the country if given the chance. At the same time, polls show a high support for Vladimir Putin and that a large part of the population believe that the full-scale invasion in Ukraine is justified. Using data from Gallup World Poll, the authors of this report examine how many of the Russian population express a desire to migrate, the characteristics of those expressing the desire to migrate, and how the mobilization 2022 affected the will to migrate.
The authors of the report are Mikael Elinder, associate professor at the Department of Economics, Uppsala University; Oscar Erixson, Ph.D. Economics, Uppsala University; Olle Hammar, Ph.D. Economics, Research Institute of Industrial Economics, and Institute for Future Studies.
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