Authors

Michael Rochlitz¹;  ¹ Oxford University, UK

Discussion

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, as well as the military mobilisation in September 2022, led to an unprecedented exodus of highly qualified IT specialists from Russia. In this paper, we investigate two related questions: why some IT specialists have left Russia while others have remained behind (1), and what the effects of this exodus are on the competitiveness of the Russian IT sector (2). We leverage an array of original data sources: a survey of 850 Russian IT specialists remaining in Russia, another survey of 1600 Russian IT specialists who have left the country and are currently living in Kazakhstan, Germany, Armenia, Cyprus, Turkey, Israel, Georgia and Serbia, as well as a series of interviews conducted with Russian IT specialists in the spring and summer of 2022 and in 2024. We find that Russian IT specialists are more likely to leave if they face the risk of being drafted, speak English, have financial resources, and have doubts about the future of the Russian IT sector. We also identified a group of IT specialists motivated to stay in Russia because of the new professional challenges and opportunities caused by the external shock to the sector after February 2022. Both those who left and those who stayed evaluate the long-term future of Russia’s IT sector in a pessimistic light.