For a long time, the fighting in Ukraine hardly seems to have played a role for Russia. With partial mobilization things are different now, and enthusiasm for the war is contained. According to one report, in two weeks alone, hundreds of thousands are preparing to avoid being sent to Putin’s war.
In the almost two weeks since partial mobilization was announced, around 700,000 people have left Russia. This is what Forbes magazine reports on its Russian-language site. 200,000 of them went to Kazakhstan alone. However, it is not clear how many are just tourists and want to return.
There are apparently different statements about the exact number. A source familiar with the Kremlin figures told Forbes that almost a million people have left Russia since the mobilization began. Another interlocutor in the presidential administration assumes that there are 600,000 to 700,000 Russians. However, it is currently not possible to estimate the number of people who have left the country for tourism purposes.
Immediately after the announcement of the mobilization on September 21, queues formed at Russian border checkpoints. Most notorious was the Upper Lars checkpoint on the Russian-Georgian border, where people queued for four to five days, often without food or water. On October 3, blogger Nikolai Levshits reported that the traffic jam at the border had cleared and cars were free to drive again. Queues also formed at the border crossings on the Russian-Kazakh border.
So far, only isolated estimates of the number of departures from the various receiving countries have been published in the media. For example, the head of Kazakhstan’s Interior Ministry, Marat Akhmetzhanov, said on October 4 that since September 21, 200,000 Russian citizens have entered the country, while 147,000 Russians have left the country during this period.
In early September, before the partial mobilization was announced, the state statistics agency Rosstat reported that 419,000 people had left Russia since the beginning of the year, twice as many as in the same period last year. Churn was 96,000, up from 114,000 in 2021.
