Putin’s disaster continues.
I’m working with a woman in Dubai to set up a VC fund for space. She’s from St. Petersburg, and she says she’s not going back.
7 thoughts on “Russia’s Brain Drain”
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Putin’s disaster continues.
I’m working with a woman in Dubai to set up a VC fund for space. She’s from St. Petersburg, and she says she’s not going back.
Comments are closed.
At least Russians have someplace to flee to. There is no where for us to go. We are all that stands between freedom and an American Holocaust.
I have a Moscow-educated (PhD), Georgian born, sister-in-law.
She’s been in the US for twenty+ years.
Not going back.
Much nicer here.
Unless you’ve personally seen and spoken to that woman in Dubai, I’d advise caution. She fits the profile of an intelligence asset. She might not even be a “she” at all.
I’ve worked with her when she was in Kiev. She went to Dubai just before the war started. I’m pretty sure she’s not an intelligence asset.
Russia had terminal demographics before Putin launched his latest war of attempted conquest in Ukraine. The war has simply sped the inevitable end of Russia. Russia is rapidly becoming a hospice state – overloaded with people 50+ and severely lacking people 40 and under. The war has killed or maimed a low-to-mid-6-figure tranche of the latter – all male – and caused an even larger, but more gender-balanced, number to flee.
The butcher’s bill in Ukraine continues to rise at an accelerating rate. With much of Russia’s best pre-war ground troops now dead, their more numerous, but less competent, replacements are dying like flies. The Ukrainians succeed in killing more and more of them before they ever get to the front. The Ukrainians then make short work of those who managed to avoid long-range missile and arty strikes on their way to the most forward of killing grounds.
Ukrainian harboring and equipping of ethnic Russian anti-Putin militias is now also paying big strategic dividends as Russia finds itself with significant chunks of its own territory placed at risk in ways not contemplated at all in the run-up to 2/24/2022.
Having to spread fewer and fewer men more thinly over more and more ground pursuant to their ill-considered Ukraine misadventure is just a foretaste of what the Russians are in for once the Ukrainians are finished expelling them entirely from Ukraine. I think the Ukrainians and those Russian militias will establish a fairly broad “buffer zone” of their own between Ukraine and the remainder of Russia. And it seems increasingly likely they will be able to make such a thing stick.
Then the restive provinces elsewhere will take the opportunity to declare their own detachments from the Russian Federation and present the Russians with an impossible military situation from which even their problematically functional nuclear arsenal cannot extract them.
The nation-state implosion that follows will make the Soviet collapse look sedate and Sunday-picnic-in the-park-like by comparison. 80+ years after the last such incident, the residents of Moscow may awake to discover hostile forces at their gates.
Sure, a lot of people who worked in international businesses left Russia. Some people left because they cannot get paid by international clients anymore now that SWIFT transactions cannot be made or local branch offices closed down.
In computer programming, mentioned in the article, the numbers are that the people who finished college in 2022 more than compensated for the people who left. So Russia today in 2023 has more programmers than it had in early 2022 before the conflict started.
As for the 1.3 million who left Russia, many of those people already came back after their contracts expired. And Russia took in like 4 million former Ukrainian citizens in the meantime.
Supply chains in civilian manufacturing in Russia were severely broken down in several sectors like car or aircraft manufacturing, and it will take varying degrees of time for adjustments to be made, it might take one or two years to design a new product which excludes the sanctioned components out. It might take one year to switch and ramp up production at an existing factory. And it might take two or three years to build a new factory.
Already in about a year the car industry in Russia started to adjust. KAMAZ trucks switched imported European components out of their new K5 series of trucks, and put the newer model into production. AvtoVAZ removed sanctioned imported components out of the Lada Vesta and started its production. Several factories which did licensed production of European or Japanese cars have now started building licensed Chinese cars instead. One example is the factory at Moscow which used to build cars for Renault.
I heard a US economist say that compared with what happened in the US when it was fighting in WW2, a war nowhere near its borders, when US civilian car production had to be totally shut down, what Russia is going through right now is no big deal. And the US economy did not implode back then for not producing civilian cars for 4 years either. People will just keep using their old cars for a longer time until new production is available.
European, Japanese, and South Korean car imports have mostly been replaced with Chinese car imports. And China this year become the world’s #1 car exporter ahead of Japan partly as a result of that.
In aircraft manufacturing it might take another year or two to design out sanctioned components and test new ones for the Sukhoi Superjet and the Irkut MS-21. They are currently flight testing the PD-8 Russian engine for the Superjet, and it is expected to finish testing on their platform this year, and be fitted to an actual Superjet for flight testing in it. The PD-14 Russian engine for the MS-21 is already in serial production and has been flying on the test aircraft for over a year at this point. The program to design out Western components on those aircraft has been running since 2017-2018 when Russia could not sell aircraft to Iran because the US dropped out of the JCPOA and would not allow export of aircraft with US components in them to Iran. The Russian government is making massive investments into civil aviation, so I expect aircraft serial production of those models to start over the next two years. The situation in small aircraft is way more critical since programs for replacing those are way behind in terms of investment and schedule. The Russians will only start bench testing some engines for small aircraft this year.
As for Russia’s demographic issues, Russia currently has a higher birthrate than European countries like Germany, life expectancy has also gone up since 1990s, and there is a huge inflow of migrants to Russia from Central Asia. Russia still has kind of lame demographics overall, but much less bad than other countries like Germany, Japan, or South Korea.
As for any attempts to create insurrection in Russia, that is why Putin created the Rosgvardiya to begin with. They have like 400,000 officers with the expansion made last year. They are a gendarmerie who answers directly to the President of Russia. Some of them are about as well armed as the regular army ground forces. So good luck with that.
As for any attempts to create insurrection in Russia, that is why Putin created the Rosgvardiya to begin with. They have like 400,000 officers with the expansion made last year. They are a gendarmerie who answers directly to the President of Russia. Some of them are about as well armed as the regular army ground forces. So good luck with that.
Classic dictatorship game there – create multiple military forces so that military force isn’t concentrated in one part of government. Sure, it’ll make insurrection somewhat more difficult now, but even if it works for now, it’ll just mean a bigger bill when Putin dies. There won’t be a clear successor.
My take is that the way things are going in Russia right now, they’ll be lucky to have an identifiable central government in 20 years – maybe a lot less than that.
As for Russia’s demographic issues, Russia currently has a higher birthrate than European countries like Germany,
Two problems with that. Germany is on the low end for Europe (it does get much worse as in Greece and Spain) and Russia barely ekes it out. France, for example, is doing better. Second, Russia has a massive emigration and death rate problem that the entire EU doesn’t have. That’s why its population is declining faster than Germany.