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"Brain drain"

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Russian Tech Industry Faces ‘Brain Drain’ as Workers Flee

Since their country invaded Ukraine, Russian tech workers have left by the thousands. They appear intent on rebuilding their lives and businesses in other countries.


Zvartnots International Airport in Yerevan, Armenia. The country has become a landing spot for tech workers leaving Russia. Credit...Daro Sulakauri for The New York Times

In early March, days after Russia invaded Ukraine and began cracking down on dissent at home, Konstantin Siniushin, a venture capitalist in Riga, Latvia, helped charter two planes out of Russia to help people flee.


Both planes departed from Moscow, carrying tech workers from the Russian capital as well as St. Petersburg, Perm, Ekaterinburg and other cities. Together, the planes moved about 300 software developers, entrepreneurs and other technology specialists out of the country, including 30 Russian workers from start-ups backed by Mr. Siniushin.

The planes flew south past the Black Sea to Yerevan, the capital of Armenia, where thousands of other Russian tech workers fled in the weeks after the invasion. Thousands more flew to Georgia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and other countries that accept Russian citizens without visas.
By March 22, a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow. They are part of a much larger exodus of workers from Russia, but their departure could have an even more lasting impact on the country’s economy.

The exodus will fundamentally change the Russian tech industry, according to interviews with more than two dozen people who are part of the tightknit community of Russian tech workers around the world, including many who left the country in recent weeks. An industry once seen as a rising force in the Russian economy is losing vast swaths of its workers. It is losing many of the bright young minds building companies for the future.

“Most Russian tech workers are part of the global market. Either they work for global companies or they are tech entrepreneurs trying to build new companies for the global market,” Mr. Siniushin said through an interpreter from his office in Riga. “So they are leaving the country.”


The recent exodus reverses 10 to 15 years of momentum in the Russian tech industry, said Konstantin Sonin, an economist at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, who immigrated from Russia to the United States. “It is now like the ’90s, when whomever was able to move moved out of the country,” he said.

Tech is a small part of the Russian economy compared with the energy and metals industries, but it has been growing rapidly. The loss of many young, educated, forward-looking people could have economic ramifications for years to come, economists said.

“The long-run impact may be more significant than the short-run impact,” said Barry Ickes, head of the economics department at Pennsylvania State University, who specializes in the Russian economy. “Eventually, Russia has to diversify its economy away from oil and gas, and it has to accelerate productivity growth. Tech was a natural way of doing that.”

Workers left the country because they objected to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, no longer wanted to live under the Putin regime and feared they could not speak their minds if they remained. Working in tech, a comparatively lucrative industry, they had money to flee the country. And like other tech workers globally, they could continue their work from anywhere with a laptop and an internet connection.

Others left because their companies pulled them out.

After foreign governments imposed sanctions on Russia and many American and European companies stopped selling products there or barred access to banking and internet services, some Russian tech workers did not have the tools needed to do their work. Companies struggled to pay them.

Some worked for companies based in Russia and others for companies with headquarters elsewhere. Many start-ups in the United States and Europe — including many founded by Russian-born entrepreneurs — relied on software coders, engineers and other tech workers in Russia. To Russian entrepreneurs living abroad, these workers were a known quantity, and they were not as expensive as specialists in Silicon Valley and other parts of the United States.

StudyFree, a San Francisco start-up that helps students find university scholarships and grants, employed about 30 workers in Russia, but keeping them there became a liability, so the company has moved them out, said Dasha Kroshkina, the company’s Russian-born founder.“We will not be able to attract as much funding if we still have employees in Russia,” she said.

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