RELOCANTS
“As long as I live in Russia I’m trying to explain to everyone how things are. But people think that everything is fine. They tell me: start with yourself. I don’t steal money, I pay taxes, I work, I throw garbage only in the trash. I do everything like a law-abiding citizen. What else should I start doing? I started going to rallies, expressing my position. And they tell me: ‘start with yourself…’. There is no hope that something can be changed in our country”.
After the announcement of the partial mobilization in Russia, according to various estimates, up to 700,000 men who did not want to die for the ambitions of the current government left the country. Almost all of them found themselves in a situation of “urgent emigration”, when the decision to leave their home was a matter of days. Kazakhstan has become one of the countries where the main flow of male migrants poured into. Local goverment and citizens did their best to help Russians fleeing from the aggression of Putin`s regime. According to the Kazakh authorities, in the first weeks of the mobilization, Kazakhstan received about 200,000 men from Russia. Many of them have choosen it as a transit point and already left, some of them are still there, waiting for their families to come along, and some of them are planning to build their lives anew in Kazakhstan. However, all of these men have one thing in common — only few of them expect to return to Russia in the near future.
