"One less engineer is one less missile flying towards Ukraine," said former Russian opposition MP Dmitry Gudkov on Tuesday at the presentation of a study on Russian exiles in Paris. Together with the economist Vladislav Inosemtsev, he founded a think tank that carried out a study with exiled Russians in France, Germany, Poland and Cyprus in collaboration with researchers from the University of Nicosia in Cyprus. 

According to the researchers, 80 percent of the 3,200 respondents fled abroad after 2014, the year of the annexation of Crimea. Almost half of these 80 percent only left the country after the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022. 

"Exodus of qualified specialists"
Most of those who fled are well educated and support Western values, the report continues. This is why a broad-based campaign for "economic immigration" from Russia makes sense. "Part of the strategy to undermine the Putin regime should be orchestrated bleeding," write the authors of the study. The Kremlin could be weakened more effectively by the "exodus of qualified specialists" and their assets than by the sanctions already in place. Moreover, there are certainly sectors in Europe where there is a shortage of skilled workers.

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