Russians Who Oppose the War Are Trapped Between Dictatorship and Absolute Rejection by The West

But we’re ready to pay the price.

Photo by Artur Kornakov on Unsplash

Most Russians I know packed their bags in early March to leave anywhere that’s not Russia. They didn’t flee sanctions, as many might think. They ran from the dictatorship.

Russians have a long history of tolerating abuse from its government — you can jail the opposition, steal money, meddle with elections, what have you — but even people as stubborn as Russians have a red line you can’t cross. The war in Ukraine became that red line for people I call “the Normal Russians” (the other category — the one that draws the letter Z everywhere they see fit — being “fascist Russians”).

But as many of these fleeing Russians soon realized, leaving their home doesn’t mean they’d avoid the costs of this war. They can’t pay with their cards or access their savings because the Russian cards don’t work abroad. (Visa and Mastercard stopped supporting Russian banks.) Even in post-Soviet countries, many international banks refuse to open bank accounts for Russian citizens. There’s also discrimination on every corner: one of my friends has been rejected a PhD degree because he’s Russian; my other friend has been refused her college application for no reason; I heard stories of people being refused…