Russia Is Losing Tens of Thousands of Outward-Looking Young Professionals

THE NEW YORK TIMES: YEREVAN, Armenia — At the Lumen cafe in the Armenian capital, Russians arrive as soon as the doors open, ordering specialty coffees, opening up their sleek Apple laptops and trying to navigate a dwindling array of options for starting their lives over.

The background music and the sunlit interior are calming counterpoints to the frantic departures from their country, where they left behind parents, pets and the sense of home that all but vanished when Russia invaded Ukraine last month.

“This war was something I thought could never happen,” said Polina Loseva, 29, a web designer from Moscow working with a private Russian I.T. company that she did not want to name. “When it started, I felt that now, everything is possible. Already they are putting people in jail for some harmless words on Facebook. It was safer to leave.”

This is a different kind of exodus — tens of thousands of young, urban, multilingual professionals who are able to work remotely from almost anywhere, many of them in information technology or freelancers in creative industries. » | Jane Arraf | Sunday, March 20, 2022

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