As many as a million Russians fled abroad in the first year of the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. Now thousands are returning home, delivering a propaganda victory to President Vladimir Putin and a boost to his war economy.

With the war still raging, and the man who started it about to assume another six-year term in power, many Russians are confronting a difficult choice. Facing rejections when renewing residence permits, difficulties with transferring work and money abroad, and limited destinations that still welcome them, they’re opting to end their self-exile.

“The business didn’t work out, no one is really waiting for us” abroad, said Alexey, a 50-year-old former political consultant from Moscow, who moved to Georgia to work as an entrepreneur after being detained at an anti-war rally in the Russian capital. He returned when his business’s finances ran out, Alexey said. He and others interviewed by Bloomberg asked not to disclose their last names for security reasons.

The February 2022 invasion provoked a mass exodus from Russia on a scale not seen since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Many left to register dissent against the war, and also out of fear of mobilization. When Putin ordered a call-up of 300,000 reservists in September 2022, it triggered a new wave of departures by hundreds of thousands of people.

The outflow has slowed, if not reversed. In June, the Kremlin boasted that half of all who fled in those early days had already returned, and that seems to reflect available statistics from the most popular destination countries as well as data from relocation companies. Based on client data at one relocation firm, Finion in Moscow, an estimated 40%-45% of those who left in 2022 have returned to Russia, said the company’s head, Vyacheslav Kartamyshev.

Putin praised the return of business people, entrepreneurs and highly qualified specialists as a “good trend.” He holds up the influx as a sign of support for his policies, regardless of the actual reasons for their homecoming, and evidence Russians have “a sense of belonging, an understanding of what is happening.”

The comeback stories are actively used in propaganda as a confirmation of “Russophobia” in the West, said Tatiana Stanovaya, founder of the political consultancy R.Politik and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. For Putin, this matters, because “it fuels him, gives him additional evidence that he was right,” she said.

Thousands of returning expatriates are also helping Russia weather wartime sanctions and deliver a solid economic performance. According to Bloomberg Economics estimates, reverse migration has likely added between one-fifth and one-third to Russia’s 3.6% annual economic growth in 2023.

Still, returning workers only constitute an estimated 0.3% to the total number of employed. That does little to ease the acute shortage on the labor market, but underscores repatriates’ outsized contribution to economic activity.

What Bloomberg Economics Says...

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