By Murad Rakhimov | 2024-12-31

TASHKENT -- Russians who fled abroad after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine are now facing ever more wrath from the Kremlin, but observers say authorities will have limited ability to follow through with their threats.

Among those expatriates are regime critics tagged as "foreign agents," as well as ordinary citizens who objected to the war or feared being drafted.

Members of this new wave of Russian emigration are known as "relocants," a Cyrillic neologism.

A bill targeting the income of these expats passed both the second and third readings in the Russian State Duma on December 17, and now it needs passage by the upper chamber and Russian President Vladimir Putin's signature to become law.

If passed, the bill will require all income that "foreign agents" earn from Russian sources be held in a special bank account.

Account holders will be able to withdraw this money only if their "foreign agent" status is lifted.

Those deemed foreign agents will not be able to receive income from intellectual property and brands.

However, some aggressively pro-war Russian politicians envision confiscating income, rather than simply impounding it as the bill stipulates, and they want to punish all expats, not just the relatively small group of "foreign agents."

The Kremlin presently lists only about 1,000 foreign agents, including both organizations and individuals, but there is a much larger population of ordinary post-February 2022 expats.

Vyacheslav Volodin, speaker of the Russian State Duma, in the November debate on foreign agents, proposed barring all post-February 2022 expats from receiving income from their property in Russia.

Income sources include real estate sales or rent earned as absentee landlords.

"Relocants who speak negatively about Russia need to have the income they have received in the country confiscated and directed to the needs of the SMO ['special military operation']," Stanislav Naumov, deputy chairman of the State Duma's committee on economic policy, said in an interview with Gazeta.ru in November, commenting on Volodin's proposal.

"If you're living on rental income from an apartment in Russia and throwing dirty water at your homeland, that will be a problem," Alexander Khinshtein, then-chairman of the State Duma's committee on information policy, wrote on Telegram November 11.

Politicians eyeing expats' money have a sizable group to target, given the number of Russians who could not abide the invasion of Ukraine.

In May 2023, the UK Ministry of Defense estimated that 1.3 million Russians left their country in 2022.

Violating international law

Such laws directly contradict the Russian constitution and international norms, said Dmitry Dubrovsky, a social scientist at Charles University in Prague.

The European Court of Human Rights has already ruled that Russia might abide by international standards and its own laws.

"It's obvious that these laws are being passed to muzzle people who criticize the government or are somehow trying to pursue independent policy in Russia or trying to stop the aggressive war [Russian President Vladimir] Putin started," Dubrovsky told Kontur.

Under Putin, the "foreign agent" designation sounds the way "enemy of the people" did under Joseph Stalin.

"Many of the entities that receive money from foreign sources are acting against the interests of the state and are actively participating in an information war on our adversary's side," said Vasily Piskarev, a member of the State Duma from the United Russia party, during debate on the bill.

Alexander Kim, an exiled blogger and activist who fights xenophobia and prejudice in Russia, views present Russian policy toward expats as a "hybrid" attack aimed at making life as difficult as possible for outspoken critics of Putin's policies.

The government is "not opening criminal cases or assigning them [the targeted expats] any special status, but at the same time their national identity documents are being revoked," Kim told Kontur.

Workaround

Some observers doubt the passage of this law will affect much the willingness and ability of Russians to leave their country in the face of the worsening political and economic situation.

The success of those who left Russia since 2022, especially the highly skilled information technology specialists, is an important example.

"By March 22 [2022], a Russian tech industry trade group estimated that between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers had left the country and that an additional 70,000 to 100,000 would soon follow," The New York Times reported in April 2022.

These specialists can work from anywhere and represent a workforce that every country prizes now, and their livelihoods are free from the grasp of the Kremlin.

A snapshot in time from early 2024 illustrates the impact of Putin's war on Russia's tech sector.

"The immigration consultancy firm Garant In saw a 233% spike in demand for European residency permits among Russian tech workers between January and March 2024," the Moscow Times reported in April.