I'm an immigrant that legally migrated into Schengen from outside Schengen. I currently have a temporary residence permit. I don't come from a country basically at war with NATO, I have a job, I earn good money, I contribute to society, I follow the laws, and still this is the most difficult thing I have ever done in my whole life, and it is not particularly close. It is expensive, it is time consuming, it is life consuming, every single step in the process is a gamble that could end up ruining my whole life in addition to taking all savings I ever had.
I feel like every day is a struggle just to keep my head above water. Even after doing everything I need to get permanent residence, I still have to wait 16 months for approval, which is longer than my temporary residence permit, and they won't renew that.
Immigrating to a country is hard. I don't blame the country I'm moving into, I get it, they have laws, but damn do I wish it was just a little bit easier.
Given how hard this is, think about how hard it will be for someone from Russia. If you just had the faintest inkling of how difficult it is, you would understand how absurd your question is.
I wish I could have it as easy as just walking in and demanding things, too bad that will guarantee that I never get to permanently decouple myself from the shithole that I was born in. And to be quite fair, knowing what I know now, about how difficult it is, I am not sure if it is even worth it.
Migrating to Schengen is indeed hard (bordering on imposing) to a lot of Russians, but that’s not the only nice place in the world.
For example India right now is quite accepting of Russian immigrants - the place is full of them. There are a lot of places that are still open, and would welcome experienced workers from Russia, granted it might not be as glamorous as EU, but I bet at this point a lot of Africa would look like an egalitarian paradise.
You are totally right that it is incredibly hard, but as a russian who had migrated to the EU I wouldn’t say it’s insurmountable - granted I did it way before the invasion, but still I never felt threatened - it was all time consuming, bureaucratic and slow, but I just had to follow the process.
Software devs seem to be in demand everywhere so plenty of peaceful and nice places for us lot to settle thankfully.
Software devs are in demand everywhere, and I know one who migrated to the same country I migrated to, from Russia, and I know that he is consumed with the threat of being deported back home, having to face being shot or shooting Ukrainians. I tell him I doubt it will happen, I want him to be able to somehow not be consumed with the prospect of going back to the shithole that is Russia, but I every time I console him, it is a lie, I lie to his face, because I can't even convince myself that I can somehow manage to stay here, but I lie because I know that being consumed with worry is like being in hell, and if I can somehow spare him that I will, even if it is a lie.
There may be other places, but it is not easy. Maybe India is an exception, maybe to India it is easy, but to the particular Schengen country I chose, it is anything but easy.
The way I look at it is, life is just way harder for most people than it is for people lucky enough to be born in the west, and it is difficult for westerners to comprehend.
When you say oppressed, it implies an oppressor, in reality, to not have "oppression" takes centuries of bloodshed and tradition.
The reason the country I'm moving from is a shithole is because we have not paid the blood price to not be a shithole, like Europe has paid. And I don't want to be around to pay that blood price, I'm too much of a coward, and I can see it coming, it is palpable, you know it is a matter of years before there is civil war and blood in the streets, there is no other way, there is just so far to fall before life is worthless, and I can see things falling every day there. I know it is just a matter of time before my parents get murdered in a civil war, but I'm powerless to stop it, and they know it also, but they pretend it does not matter. So you just have to do everything you can to ignore it, and do your best to keep gambling, hoping you win the lottery out of the shithole.
And again, I'm not Russian, Russians have it 1000x times worse than me, I thank the god I don't believe in every day that I don't have it as hard as they do.
I am not trying to downplay your personal struggle. There’s more to discuss here than a few posts allow. What I will say is that it’s hard to empathize with complaints or totally absolve people of responsibility for their state of oppression when as you say they don't want to pay the price to liberate themselves. If you can live happily in an oppressive regime then good for you, seriously. But when you start getting oppressed, don’t come crying. And when your country starts committing war crimes, don’t be surprised if people criticize your inaction and apathy.
> And when your country starts committing war crimes, don’t be surprised if people criticize your inaction and apathy.
Who stopped selling weapons to Ukraine? Who lifted sanctions on Nordstream II? What NATO country were more favourable to Russia than US, and as a result, restructured their "green" energy policy to be a "little green men" energy policy where they completely tied their economy to fossil fuel supplied by Russia, while laughing like petulant schoolchildren when warned that this will have negative consequences?
Yeah, sure, the Russians are all cowards for not dying on mass in another revolution that is likely to go nowhere better than the last. I'm a coward for fleeing my shithole home country instead of staying there and killing my fellow citizens in a civil war that is inevitable.
But the blood of the Ukrainians are also on NATO's hands. It is especially on the hands of Germans, French, Americans and citizens. If they made better choices, Ukrainians would not have to die. But instead, NATO gave every signal to Russia that they will do nothing to stop its excursions into sovereign nations, while also making clear that want Ukraine in NATO, and that NATO is primarily an anti-Russian alliance that refuses to lift a single finger to keep Russia at bay.
I’m not Russian but have some experience with moving around with a (once)weak passport: You can’t just go wherever you like.
You are not welcome and they won’t let you come if they suspect you might stay. Some conspire to send you to Rwanda, some beat you up on the border, others lock you up in concentration camps.
You are also the boogyman for about %20-%50 of the population of the country you go and about that many politicians promise to get rid of you if they get elected.
One day you are on the bus and feel tired, a seat frees up and you snap it. You look around and see hateful stares directed at you.
For many many years you can’t function like a normal person. You can’t have a normal job, you can’t start a business, you can’t rent, you can’t subscribe to utilities and you need to find people who will help you out with all this all the time.
Some places will be more helpful than others but will make you feel your boundaries all the time and they will get rid of you at your first mistake.
Also, remember how you are active citizen protesting against war in your own country? You can’t protest in your new country, you are expected to be cooperating %100 of the time with whatever the locals do. Moving to another country, means you completely give up your aspirations of influencing the society.
It's really sad what people like you have to overcome. Fortunately this is not the case for majority immigrants from Russia even though it's multinational country. Very few people in west would ever be able to tell if a person in front of them is from Russia, Ukraine or Belarus. In some countries locals can't even tell we're foreigners.
Problems of people who immigrating from Russia are mostly financial.
Hah yeah, until you open your mouth - then its usually _painfully_ obvious you’re from Russia. The accent is very distinctive and inescapable.
I have the luck to have learned english when I was a kid, alongside another foreign language, so people place me as “broadly eastern european” rather than precisely Russian but almost all expats I encounter I can immediately tell they are from there.
While it's true this is simply incomparable with having different skin color and face. Also a lot of people who fled from Ukraine only speak Russian and have about the same accent in English. Of course they also sometimes get some hate even though they actually from Ukraine.
Talking of me personally I just happy to have somewhat different accent due to how many years I spend in SEA. My wife is half kurdish half russian so for her it's even harder to tell where is she from.
For once because no one welcome people with Russian passport regardless of fact that you're against the war. It's possible to get humanitarian visa to a few EU few countries, but it's very difficult unless you're already under criminal investigation.
Few countries where it easy to move is ex-USSR countries like Georgia, Armenia, Kazahstan, etc. Unfortunately in all of them except Georgia there is high risk of extradition. And there good chance Georgia can simply close border at any moment or refuse entry at random.
There are few other countries including Turkey, Montenegro, Serbia, but moving there is actually quite expensive. It's really only an option for IT people who work remotely and there good chance your residency permit won't be renewed at any moment. Finding offline job in those countries even harder and with inflated cost of rent such job will barely pay enough to survive.
I personally donated to Armed Forces of Ukraine and posted enough on social media to get myself in prison for next 10 years, but I not gonna to attract attention to myself just to to get a visa.
The article says he was investigated only after his daughter drew a picture in class. So it probably wasn't particularly planned. And then he fled to Belarus once he got wind of the charges.
Oh I think I saw the same clip… one of those street interviews and a woman walks up and starts going like “You won’t dare showing this but I tell you I and many others support our preside-“ and gets nabbed by Russian police.
>Is vehemently disowning the art piece not enough to avoid jail or is it to the point where they’re jailing people for any excuse at all?
RuZZians(= imperialists Russians that are Z patriots) say that he was not jailed because of the child drawing, the child drawing ONLY caused the police to bring him in, then they found some social media posts and that is the main excuse for his sentence, the Zeds see this as normal.
What usually happens in cases like this, is you look closer, and it turns out there was a neighbor who had wanted to build a shed on the property line, and the guy told him off, and the neighbor happens to be a member of the CP...
If you're trying to solidify a regime of judicial terror, I would expect these kinds of cases would be pure gold. The fact that something as benign as a child's drawing couldn't be explained away would amplify the fear and force people to be more aggressive about policing their own thoughts: if the police can find out about a random kid's drawing, they'll definitely discover anything you do that's more than that. Among other things, it gives the state's security forces (and at this point, you can stick the Russian judiciary in that category) the impression of greater power and reach, which also makes people more likely to denounce others.
During World War 2, public perception of the Gestapo always exceeded its actual effective capabilities (at least in terms of agents watching random people and informers at every table) which was a huge part of why people were so willing to inform. Nearly all of the postcards written by Otto and Elise Hampel[0] were turned into the Gestapo by the people who found them, for example. One would expect at least some of the people to toss them in the trash to avoid any risk of entanglement, unless they were more worried about getting caught not turning them in. Richard J. Evans briefly touches on the subject in his Third Reich in Power book:
> [...] What counted was not whether or not there really were informers everywhere, but the fact that people thought there were. The disillusioned writer and journalist Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen recorded his friends’ and his own hatred of Hitler in the privacy of his diary and wondered on 9 September 1937 if anyone outside Germany had ‘any idea of how completely without legal status we are, of what it is to be threatened with denunciation at any
What's really surreal is that even the Gestapo itself realized very early in the regime just how screwed-up the system, not that they ever tried to fix things:
> [...] So many denunciations were sent in to the Gestapo that even fanatical leading Nazis such as Reinhard Heydrich complained about them and the district Gestapo office in Saarbrücken itself registered its alarm at the ‘constant expansion of an appalling system of denunciation’. What dismayed them was in particular the fact that many denunciations appeared to be made from personal rather than ideological motives. [...]
Basically, build up enough fear and you'll influence the population to do police and surveil itself; possibly to a level that even the state itself thinks is excessive and problematic. Returning to the original subject, it's not unsurprising to see Russia to extend its crackdowns to even more absurd cases. The Nazis did the same thing as it became clear they were losing the war, with executions for treason skyrocketing for even the most mundane activities and jokes.
When things are going wrong, authoritarian regimes take it out on their citizens in the hopes that if they just use a strict enough hand against them, they'll somehow cause something to change. Russia isn't in anywhere near as dire straits as Nazi Germany was, obviously, but the same basic impulse is always there.
I suspect for many people the process is hard to say the least.
Where would you live? Where can you work? Will you even find a job if you legally can work? Will your rights be protected even there? What happens to family back home? Can you take enough money with?
Many people have left hastily but they seem to be people with means, or directly at risk (conscription), young men who can grit it out for a while somewhere else.
Most people don't have connections in other countries to run to.
Also, most european countries don't allow russian¹² refugees anymore, and traveling by plane into western countries is impossible for (non-oligarch-level-wealthy) russians.
It's not impossible at all. Russians flying to Turkey for a vacation is still normal - yes, even ordinary middle class people. My friends living in EU are using this to meet with their family in safety.
That's very inaccurate. The German case states that the possibility to be drafted alone doesn't constitute grounds for asylum, you need some form individual persecution (because of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion etc) in Germany. "I got charged because my daughter drew a picture that called for peace" will be a very different case than "I'd rather not fight personally".
It's not new either, it has pretty much always been that way. A lot of German politicians are calling for exceptions for Russians (which would effectively end the practice for all countries) to weaken Russia's ability to draft more people.
Let me remind everyone reading this that a "typical" salary in Russia is 30-40k rubles per month. They don't publish the median, and the mean is absolutely useless. This will maybe buy you a one-way ticket to a neighboring country, but how are you going to survive afterwards?
Many countries don't issue visas and residence permits to Russian due to sanctions, for example, it is difficult to get to EU. There are countries you can leave for, but there are no jobs or they are with low pay, Russian education certificates are not usable there. So you can escape, but how are you going to live there if you don't have money?
Of course if you are rich that is not a problem. For example, relatives of high-ranked officials are sometimes seen spending time in Europe, shopping or visiting resorts, financing the economy of NATO countries.
From your question I can guess you most likely live in a developed country with a great passport and/or have a career where you make great money enabling you to move country whenever you want.
But for everyone else, to leave their country and move somewhere else legally, you need a visa, and a lot of money, which not everyone in Russia has.
Most countries where Russians left en masses to due to lax visa requirements, pushed the rent prices there to 2x-4x till today. Not great for the locals and not great for the Russians also trying to move there. And most western counties aren't in a rush to issue visas to all Russians.
Unless you have relatives abroad to help you out, or a skilled lucrative profession enabling you to save money and get a visa, you're screwed.
And that's besides the whole ordeal of leaving vulnerable family members behind.
Sure (I am Russian, emigrated in 2005, never been in Russia since 2014). Here are some of the actual reasons:
1) Immigration is hard. Particularly when you are not from a well-developed country with a powerful passport. You will live on a borrowed time, where the host country will invent reasons to deport you (to Russia, of course, where you most probably will be jailed in no time). I live in Switzerland for 18 years, and still on a temporary residence permit, as the Swiss government invents more and more creative laws and rules to deny me a permanent residence, not to mention citizenship, which is a pipe dream at this point.
2) Leaving your parents and elder relatives might not be something many people are ready for. In Russia, there is a strong notion that children are supposed to support their parents in the old age.
3) One misadventure with the Russian law (and many people from Russian opposition have a lot of them for their protests), and you can’t go out. You will be stopped at the border. The ability to exit the country is a privilege in Russia; not yet at the level it used to be in the USSR, but a privilege nonetheless.
4) Some heroic people think that they have to stay and fight, instead of quitting. It might be near impossible, but they have a reason.
Etc, etc. Those who could move out are really lucky. I am lucky, too.
They just reinstated крепостное право, now one can't leave the country if a military recruitment office (военкомат) sent a summon letter (even if you don't receive it. You have to check yourself manually on a special website beforehand). Along with other restrictions like ban on transactions involving real estate (land, apartments, houses) and such.
They did, because either they didn’t have criminal charges against them yet, or were smuggled out of the country illegally.
If you have criminal charges against you in Russia, you can’t get out. And at this point you can be sentenced to 5 years for “discriminating the army” if you write publicly in a social network that you are against war or that there were war crimes. Many people who did are already in jail, others will be detained if they attempt border crossing.
After five years (+2 years of the process itself), while constantly checking if your marriage is still alive and well (like, spying on you or asking your neighbors or even calling your kids at 7AM if you have any; and, of course, endless interviews for both you and your wife to exclude that your marriage is fictional).
About 30% of Russians are against the war (20% don't know, 50% support the war). That's about 40 million people that would have to leave the country.
Only 30% of Russians have travel passports, and most of them used them to travel to Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other ex-Soviet countries to visit their relatives.
Those numbers are pulled right out of someone's ass. No-one really knows how many citizens are for and against the war (there were some hints that the Kremlin did several unofficial polls and really didn't like their results, but nothing supported by good evidence).
Also, you don't need a travel passport to visit relatives in ECU (which Kazakhstan is a member of), and it's pretty much impossible to visit Ukraine legally regardless of whether you have a passport or not.
I have a Russian passport and I've been to Kiev in December 2021. It was just a few months before war has started and talks about possible war was all around the news for months already.
Had no problem crossing Ukraine border control. Of course after war started it became impossible, but it was very much expected.
Because they are poor people not speaking any foreign languages (Russian language education system is intentionally terrible), with no marketable skills relevant outside of Russia. They are both victims of the system and it's products, unalienable from the system itself.
The dissidents still stuck in Russia are for the most part people that would not be able to succeed at all in Europe. Big name scientists left during the 90s, people who succeeded economically started leaving post 2008(once Putin/bureaucrats started clamping down on free business) and the last of both groups got out once the conflict started.
I mean at this point in time most European/ex-USSR countries have put measures in place to prevent dissenters escaping there, so it also isn't easy even if you do have skills.
Leaving Russia is difficult and takes a lot of money and connections. Most people don't have that or have other reasons not to. It's "smart" to stay quiet and not put yourself in danger but people like Moskalyov are compelled to at least say something.
I recommend quitting theatrics. Yes Russia implementing absolutely awful laws. They do not yet send people to labor camps en masse and living standard is still much higher.
They have quite a way to go down to NK levels. I hope that fucker Putin and his cronies gets wiped out before it happens.
Also the West is not really looking forward to accept Russian refugees / dissenters. They do send them back.
Colonies in Russia are essentially labor camps. And mandatory work (e.g. making goods like uniform for army and police) is still an essential part of russian penitentiary system.
