An excerpt from Leonid Ragozin's piece in Bloomberg BusinessWeek about how the fighting in Ukraine has prompted an exodus of highly skilled pro-Western middle-class Russians to leave and head to Latvia, among other places. You can read the entire piece here:
Oksana Bratislavskaya says she’s never had any illusions about Russia, where she was born and has lived all her 37 years. The politically liberal lawyer says she and her husband, an IT expert, have grown estranged from the Russia of Vladimir Putin.
“We have always been foreigners here. They call us ‘Westernizers,’ ‘the fifth column,’ or ‘national traitors’ -- in Stalin’s and Hitler’s fashion.”
But it was the war in Ukraine that left the couple “without oxygen,” as she puts it. “We were appalled by the scale of public support for the annexation of Crimea and the subsequent war in Ukraine,” she says.
So Bratislavskaya’s family joined the latest wave of emigration, which is almost entirely composed of highly skilled middle-class urbanites frustrated by the war in Ukraine and the suppression of the democratic opposition under Putin. They’re heading for European countries such as Latvia, where they can get residence permits in exchange for investment, most typically in property. Hungary, Poland, Finland, Spain, and Greece offer similar deals.
From Bloomberg:
Pro-Russian rebels fired on Ukrainian troops at 11 positions as an international commission was expected to start its work on setting up borders for a buffer zone between the battling sides.
Rebels again tried to take over the airport in Donetsk, the largest city in the conflict area, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry said on its Facebook page today.
Shelling and explosions were heard in the city early this morning and the situation was “tense,” according to a statement on the city council’s website.