The Political Diversity of the New Migration from Russia Since February 2022

While estimates vary, Russia’s full-scale of invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted approximately 800,000 to 900,000 Russian citizens to leave their country. Two distinct waves of migration from Russia have been identified: the first in the spring and summer of 2022, the second after the announcement of a partial mobilisation in September 2022. A significant number of Russian migrants have since returned to Russia, and it is estimated that 650,000 remain abroad. This report focuses on five of the most important destination countries for new Russian migration: Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. We conducted face-to-face interviews with around 4,300 Russian citizens across the five countries in the summer of 2023. The aim was to get a clearer sense of their political attitudes and determine whether different countries were popular with particular categories of migrants. For each of the five countries, we can demonstrate a correlation between the migrants’ socio-demographic profile and their political views, in particular their position on Russia’s war against Ukraine.