Russia Desperately Needs Those who have Fled the Country to Return but the Kremlin Equally Desperately Doesn’t, ‘Politsovet’ Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 11 – Russia desperately needs the more than half a million Russians who have fled the country to avoid being mobilized to return to help the economy recover and to overcome its current demographic problems, Yekaterinburg’s Politsovet news agency says. But the Kremlin equally desperately doesn’t need them back.

            The reasons for that are obvious, the portal continues. On the one hand, such people “by definition” aren’t loyal to the powers that be and can’t be expected to do what they are told in the future. Instead, they only generate new opposition to the regime (politsovet.ru/75357-relokanty-kak-vnutrennyaya-problema-rossiyskie-politiki-zadumalis-chto-delat-s-uehavshimi.html).

            And on the other, these people have already found themselves to be capable of living abroad and feel with justice that they can live in the future “without the current Russian powers.” Were they to return to Russia en masse, that would thus challenge the values on which the Putin regime rests and threaten its survival.

           Some like Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin have called those who have left traitors, and officials in Russian-occupied Crimea have urged that all of them be labelled “foreign agents.” Such appeals to an alarming degree reflect an important reality, one that suggests those who have left are lost to Russia not for a short time but perhaps forever.