OUTRICHER RESEARCH
REPORT 2026-RU-01 · EDITION 3 · DATA AS OF 12.06.2026
Analytical report · Russian-speaking professionals worldwide

Diaspora/2026

Who left Russia, where they settled, and how the Russian-speaking professional world abroad works.

The first quantitative study built on 1.17 billion career profiles: the scale and dynamics of the exodus, a portrait of the diaspora by occupation and seniority, the inner workings of “Russian IT” abroad, an AI deep dive, and practical benchmarks for companies, HR teams and market players. Three independent signals, 30 countries measured, calibration against 69,142 known professionals, samples validated by exact counts.

1.2 M
professionals with Russian education abroad: 934K measured directly, 1,244K by model
200–600 K
left after February 24, 2022 and have not returned — a conservative model range
×2
2022 departures: double the 2021 pace and four times pre-war 2019 — the break shows in two independent signals
61%
of the war wave is IT and data: the most technical cohort in the country's history has left
8 182
people work for Russia's flagship employers while living abroad — “tethered”
Summary / 12 findings

What we learned by counting the diaspora through its career footprints

  1. More than a million professionals with Russian education live and work outside Russia: 934 037 measured directly across 30 countries; the model puts it at 1 243 788. Every figure is a lower bound.
  2. Between 200,000 and 600,000 left after February 24, 2022 and are still abroad (187 505–615 856 by model). Consistent with The Bell (~650K emigrants of all kinds): our figure covers only people with a career profile.
  3. 2022 was the peak in both volume and non-return: departures doubled against 2021 (×2.0; ×4 against pre-war 2019), and the 2022 cohort shows the highest share still abroad — 64% of those who left the flagships in 2022 are abroad today.
  4. The war wave is the most technical: 61% of those who left the flagships in 2022+ are engineers and data specialists (against 28% across the diaspora). The industry's core left.
  5. The diaspora is a mature labor market, not a student body: 47% have 15+ years of experience; the median in Israel and the Netherlands is 16 years. New hubs run younger: Georgia's median is 10 years.
  6. Companies followed the people: 8 182 people with Russian backgrounds work for the flagships from abroad; Yandex accounts for 3 612, including 1 031 in Serbia.
  7. Serbia is the war wave's No. 1 destination (1 931 people from the flagship cohort), followed by Germany, Kazakhstan, the US and the UAE. Post-Soviet hubs absorbed the volume; the West took the seniors: 46% of the wave in Cyprus is senior+, against 32% in Kazakhstan.
  8. Cities: old emigration versus new. The largest communities are New York (≈32K) and the Bay Area (≈29K); but Tbilisi, Belgrade, Yerevan and Limassol grew almost from zero in two years — in Serbia, 60% of datable arrivals came after 2022.
  9. The AI diaspora is already visible in frontier labs: 3 198 profiles with Russian backgrounds across 13 leading AI companies — 189 at OpenAI, 99 at Anthropic. Nebius — a company that is 53% people with Russian pasts — is worth more than $50bn.
  10. HSE is emigration's top university, followed by MSU, MIPT, Bauman MSTU and ITMO. The route depends on the alma mater: 24% of MIPT graduates who left are in the US.
  11. The academic diaspora numbers in the tens of thousands: ≈17 256 scientists and lecturers with Russian education abroad (model); 7.0% of the diaspora works in universities and research.
  12. The diaspora is reachable: 75.7% of the cohort can be identified for direct contact, each with a full career history. This is the largest labeled pool of Russian-speaking senior talent outside Russia.
01
Scale

A diaspora the size of a metropolis

Emigration is usually estimated through surveys and border statistics. We followed career footprints instead: Russian education in the résumé, employment at flagship Russian companies, Russian language in the profile. Every figure is either a direct count across 1.17 billion profiles or a model with an open formula. The samples were validated by exact counts: they understate shares by 22–30%, so everything below is a lower bound.

EXHIBIT 01
MEASURED

The measurement ladder: from 6.3 million profiles in Russia to a million-strong diaspora

Three independent signals — three levels of confidence; we show all of them, not just the flattering one
RungPeopleWhat it means
Profiles currently located in Russia6 305 071exact count — how many professionals are “visible” inside the country
Russian-educated abroad — measured934 037direct count across 30 countries: the profile lists a Russian university or school
Same, adjusted for profile completeness (model)1 243 788education is recognized for only 75.1% of even known-Russian professionals — we divide by that share
Listed Russian as a language — all measured countries2 125 034the broadest signal: includes Russian speakers from across the former USSR
— of them, outside the former USSR1 710 328Russian-speaking professionals beyond the post-Soviet space
HOW TO READThe language signal is broader than the education signal but more sparsely filled in: only 39.5% of even elite Russian professionals list languages — so 2.1M “listed Russian” profiles are consistent with a diaspora of several million. Why it matters: every row can be re-verified by re-running the query against the data.
EXHIBIT 02
MEASURED

Geography: the US is the largest pool

Profiles explicitly listing Russian, by country — lower bounds
HOW TO READGreen bars — former USSR (historical communities + the new wave); cyan bars — the rest of the world.
EXHIBIT 03
MEASURED

Concentration: the most “Russian” markets

Share of a country's profiles listing Russian, %
HOW TO READIn Armenia, 12.9% of all profiles list Russian; in Georgia, 10.2% — against 0.2% in the US. This is a map of density, not size.
EXHIBIT 04
BENCHMARK

Our estimate against external ones: the numbers converge

These sources measured different things by different methods — which makes the agreement all the more valuable
Source, yearWhat it measuredEstimateConsistent?
Re:Russia, 2023everyone who left by mid-2023820–920Kyes — our diaspora is the “has a profile” subset
The Bell, 2024those remaining abroad~650Kyes — our 200–600K covers professionals, without families
Russia's Ministry of Digital Development, 2022IT specialists who left~100Kyes — the IT share of the war wave is of the same order
Wachs, EPJ Data Science, 2023developer migration via code11.1% by Nov 2022yes — an independent digital footprint, same dynamics
OutRush, 2023–24emigration composition (surveys)>45% in IT, 80% with degreesyes — matches on structure
This study, 2026Russian-educated professionals abroad934 037 measured · 1.24M by modeldirect measurement of career footprints, 30 countries
WHY IT MATTERSNo single source sees the whole picture: surveys do not know the underlying population, and border statistics cannot tell a tourist from an emigrant. Career profiles are the only dataset where the person, their occupation and their new country are visible at once. We do not cite estimates with undisclosed methodology (chapter 07).
02
Dynamics

The 2022 wave: a break visible in any dataset

The year of departure is reconstructed from career history: when the last position with a Russian location ends, the person is “dated.” This yields two fully independent curves: one for the Russian-educated diaspora, one for exits from ten flagship employers. Both break in 2022.

EXHIBIT 05
MEASURED

Two independent signals, one break: departures double in 2022

Departure pace against the pre-war 2019 baseline (index, 2019 = 100): different scales — same shape
Departure index · 2019 = 100
What the two signals are

Signal A — diaspora career histories. A person with Russian education closes their last Russia-located position — a dated "departure" event (5 665 datable events in the sample). 2022 has twice as many of them as 2021 — and four times the 2019 level.

Signal B — exits from the ten flagships. 69,142 people who left Yandex, Sber, T-Bank and the others since 2019. Leaving a company ≠ leaving the country, so the pace is lower — ×2.0 vs 2019; but a record 64% of the 2022 cohort ended up abroad (Exhibit 07).

Why the agreement can be trusted: the signals are built on different people, different data tables and different definitions — and both break at the same point, in early 2022. 49.5% of all datable departures in today's diaspora came after January 1, 2022.

HOW TO READThe index removes the scale gap (hundreds of sample events vs thousands of cohort people) and keeps the curve shapes. Hover for the underlying values. The 2023–2025 decline is partly real stabilization, partly lag: fresh departures enter career data late, so the right tail is understated.
EXHIBIT 06
MEASURED

The flagship exodus: 69,142 people since 2019

The ten largest tech-sector employers; “abroad” is measured among those whose current country is known
CompanyLeft 2019+After Feb 2022Now abroadShare abroad
Yandex23,68617,81362.4%
Gazprom1,58870970.1%
Kaspersky5,4463,44760.2%
VK (Mail.ru)3,38671153.8%
Sber12,5007,57853.3%
Wildberries1,8101,45550.7%
T-Bank (Tinkoff)9,1957,47049.9%
Avito3,4233,01949.5%
Ozon6,3715,17547.0%
MTS6,7513,86039.3%
HOW TO READThis is not ordinary churn: more than half of those who left are now abroad. One in six of the 69,142 came from Yandex. From the primary source: Yandex's founder told the FT that “half the top management and 10% of the developers” ended up outside Russia.
EXHIBIT 07
MEASURED

2022: the peak of volume and non-return

Exits from the flagships (bars) and the share who ended up abroad (line)
HOW TO READBefore the war, 55–59% of job-changers went abroad; in 2022 it was 64% at record volume: people quit in order to leave the country.
EXHIBIT 08
MEASURED

Where the war wave went

The 2022+ flagship cohort now abroad: countries
HOW TO READA two-layer map: visa-free hubs absorbed the mass quickly, while Western markets recruited through work visas — slower, but for good.
EXHIBIT 09
MEASURED

War-wave cities: Belgrade is the largest single hub

The 2022+ flagship cohort abroad, by city
CONTEXTSince February 2022, Russian citizens have registered 789 companies and 2,134 sole proprietorships in Serbia (official European Parliament reply, 2023). The IMF links Armenia's 12.6% GDP growth in 2022 to the inflow of people and capital from Russia; remittances to Georgia grew fivefold, to $2bn a year.
03
Portrait

Who these people are: occupations, seniority, universities

We classified 12 916 Russian-educated profiles across 30 countries: job titles, seniority, universities, fields of study, cities. The summary distributions are country-weighted — without this, fixed samples would overstate small hubs and understate the US and Europe. The diaspora is not “a hundred thousand IT workers”: it is an economy in miniature, with doctors, lawyers, scientists and entrepreneurs.

EXHIBIT 10
MEASURED

What the diaspora does: IT and data at 28%, the rest spans the whole economy

Distribution by function among profiles with a recognized role; country-weighted
Major blocks · % of recognized roles
Full distribution · % of recognized roles
HOW TO READIT engineering plus data/AI is the largest block but not a majority: next come executives and business owners, marketing and sales, operations and finance. Why it matters: for host countries this is an inflow not only of developers but of managers, doctors and teachers.
EXHIBIT 11
MEASURED

Seniority: the seniors left, not the students

Diaspora seniority, % of recognized; country-weighted
HOW TO READIndividual contributors are the majority, but one in six is a head-level-or-above manager or a founder.
EXHIBIT 12
MEASURED

Where the seniors go: war-wave seniority

Share of senior+ among 2022+ flagship leavers, by country
HOW TO READCyprus, Portugal and the UAE collect the top of the pyramid; Kazakhstan and Belarus take a younger wave. The gap is nearly twofold.
EXHIBIT 13
MEASURED

The diaspora's alma maters: HSE has overtaken MSU

Left — universities by graduate count in the sample; right — what they studied (field-of-study mentions)
Universities · graduates in the sample
Fields of study · mentions
4%
of profiles listing a degree include a PhD, a Candidate or a Doctor of Sciences
1.4%
list an MBA — management education on top of a first degree
74%
graduated in the 2010s or later — the diaspora's core is aged 28–38
CONTEXTMacroPolo's Global AI Talent Tracker ties Russia's growing share of the world's top-tier AI researchers to a single university — MIPT. The fields of study agree: computer science, applied mathematics and economics top the list.
EXHIBIT 14
MEASURED

The university sets the route: MIPT graduates head for the US, HSE graduates go everywhere

Where top universities' graduates end up: country shares among a university's graduates found abroad (weighted), %
UniversityIn sampleTop destinations (share of the university's graduates, %)
HSE University (Higher School of Economics)731United States 13.4% · Germany 13.4% · UAE 9.2% · United Kingdom 7.8% · Spain 7.3%
Lomonosov Moscow State University640United States 32.3% · Germany 10.3% · Kazakhstan 6.2% · Italy 5.9% · Netherlands 5.8%
Saint Petersburg State University422United States 19.3% · Germany 17.5% · Netherlands 6.3% · Canada 5.4% · Spain 5.3%
Bauman Moscow State Technical University286Germany 15.7% · UAE 13% · Canada 10% · Georgia 7% · Israel 5.7%
Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University279United States 14.1% · Türkiye 8.4% · Germany 8.2% · Finland 8.1% · Spain 7.7%
ITMO University255United States 27.4% · Germany 13.2% · Canada 7.6% · Georgia 5.5% · United Kingdom 4.8%
Plekhanov Russian University of Economics248Germany 13.1% · Netherlands 11.8% · Canada 9.4% · UAE 7% · Armenia 6.1%
RANEPA (Presidential Academy)178UAE 17% · Italy 15.2% · Spain 12.8% · Kazakhstan 10.4% · France 7.6%
HOW TO READPercentages are within each university's row. Technical universities gravitate toward the US and Northern Europe; economics-focused ones toward the UAE and Cyprus. A university's “career gravity” is the most stable predictor of destination country — stronger than occupation.
EXHIBIT 15
MODEL

Diaspora cities: New York and the Bay Area ahead of Tbilisi and Belgrade

Estimated Russian-educated diaspora by city, people (weighted model)
HOW TO READOld emigration built the largest communities in New York and California; the war wave built new hubs — Tbilisi, Belgrade, Yerevan, Limassol — almost from scratch in two years. In Germany the diaspora is scattered across five cities; in Serbia it is concentrated in one. For anyone opening offices or assembling teams, this is a direct pointer.
04
Current state · for companies and HR

How the diaspora has settled: employers, experience, market maturity

The exodus is half the story. The other half is how these people live and work now: who employs them, how much experience they carry, which communities have settled and which are still forming, and who keeps working for Russian companies from abroad. This is an operating map for anyone hiring, opening offices or building products for the diaspora.

EXHIBIT 16
MEASURED

Who the diaspora works for

Current employer categories, % of the diaspora; country-weighted
HOW TO READMost are embedded in ordinary local and international companies in their host countries; 7.0% work in universities and research, 2.1% in global corporations from the brand list, 1.8% freelance. Categories follow brand dictionaries, conservatively.
EXHIBIT 17
MEASURED

Experience: a market of seasoned professionals

Years since first career position, % of the diaspora; weighted
HOW TO READ47% of the diaspora has 15+ years of experience. Juniors are scarce: the young either did not leave or are not yet visible in career data.
EXHIBIT 18
MEASURED

Market maturity: median experience by country

Median career years of the diaspora in each country
HOW TO READIsrael, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Finland are “old” markets with a median around 16 years. Georgia and Armenia hold the young wave: a median of 10–10 years. Experience is a proxy for age and salary expectations.
EXHIBIT 19
MEASURED

Community age: where the diaspora is “new”

Share of datable arrivals after January 1, 2022, % by country
HOW TO READIn Serbia and the UAE, ~60% of the community arrived after 2022 — the infrastructure (schools, services, communities) is still forming. In Finland and the US, old emigration dominates (26% newcomers in Finland).
EXHIBIT 20
MEASURED

“Tethered”: 8 182 people work for Russia's flagship employers from abroad

Current employees of the 10 flagships with Russian backgrounds outside Russia; local hires at overseas offices filtered out
By company · people with RU backgrounds
What it means

Yandex leads: 3 612 people, 1 031 of them in Serbia — the company's second engineering center is now effectively in Belgrade. At T-Bank and Avito the count runs into the hundreds.

Why it matters: remote work for Russia is the forgotten part of the exodus. These people pay taxes in their new countries while working for Russian businesses. For local markets they are a talent reserve with a known employer; for Russian companies, a live network abroad.

The count is exact: all 22 496 foreign-based profiles of current employees were checked; a Russian background was confirmed for 36%.

HOW TO READThe top geography of Yandex's “tethered” staff — Serbia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, the UK — is, in effect, the map of its hubs abroad.
EXHIBIT 21
MEASURED

The diaspora's employers and industries

Left — the largest current employers in the sample; right — industries of employment
Employers · people in the sample
Industries · people in the sample
HOW TO READThree layers of employers: international outsourcers and fintech (EPAM, Exness, Revolut), relocated RU-rooted companies (inDrive, JetBrains, Wargaming, Playrix), and a visible freelance segment. Why it matters: the diaspora is already embedded in global companies — a channel for transferring expertise that sanctions cannot close.
05
The headline segment

IT under the microscope: who writes the code, and where

IT is the core of the exodus and the market's main interest: 61% of the flagship war wave are engineers and data specialists. We break this mass down by occupation, country, skills and new employers.

EXHIBIT 22
MEASURED

The diaspora's IT occupations

% of the IT cohort; country-weighted
HOW TO READBackend and analytics are the bulk; ML/Data Science is the growing core.
EXHIBIT 23
MEASURED

War-wave IT occupations

Flagship leavers 2022+, people
HOW TO READThe flagships were losing data and platform teams — the wave's mix is visibly more data-science-heavy than the older diaspora's.
EXHIBIT 24
MEASURED

Engineering hubs versus service hubs

IT and data share of each country's diaspora, %
HOW TO READGeorgia, Armenia, Serbia, Cyprus and the Netherlands are “engineering” hubs: people moved there in whole teams. In Turkey and Spain the diaspora leans more toward services and entrepreneurship.
EXHIBIT 25
MEASURED

Each wave more technical than the last

Share of IT/data and AI roles among flagship leavers, by year
HOW TO READThe “quality” of the outflow grew faster than its volume: technical concentration peaked in 2022–2023, and AI roles are rising in both share and absolute numbers.
EXHIBIT 26
MEASURED

Where the IT wave landed and what it can do

Left — employers of 2022+ leavers (intra-group transfers excluded); right — skills of the diaspora's IT cohort
The war wave's new employers · people
IT diaspora skills · mentions in the sample
Routes out of Yandex · war wave, top destinations
DestinationPeopleDestinationPeople
Yandex (group)769Nebius210
Avride128Yandex Practicum (group)115
Google107Yango99
JetBrains97Yandex Practicum (group)97
HOW TO READThree route types: relocated RU-rooted companies (Nebius, inDrive, JetBrains), global tech (Google, Microsoft, Booking, Revolut) and intra-group transfers — employees who moved with their companies' international entities. Skills are self-reported: SQL, JavaScript, Java, Linux, C++ — the portrait of a solid production engineer.
06
The most expensive talent

The AI deep dive: the Russian-speaking footprint in the model race

We checked every profile listed at the world's leading AI companies for a Russian background — education in Russia or Russian language in the résumé. This is direct measurement, not extrapolation.

EXHIBIT 27
MEASURED

Frontier companies: 3 198 people with Russian backgrounds

Every profile listing the company as current employer checked one by one; “RU signal” = Russian education or Russian language
CompanyTotal profilesRU signalShareWhere they sit (RU cohort's top countries)
NVIDIA57 9511 5932.7%United States, Israel, Germany
Nebius1 28868553.2%Netherlands, Israel, Germany
Google DeepMind64 5393620.6%United States, Canada, Mexico
OpenAI10 9831891.7%United States, United Kingdom, Germany
Anthropic4 805992.1%United States, United Kingdom, Ireland
Perplexity1 380967.0%Serbia, United States, United Kingdom
xAI3 572902.5%United States, United Kingdom, Germany
ElevenLabs779324.1%United Kingdom, Germany, United States
Cohere1 151242.1%Canada, United Kingdom, United States
Hugging Face7 51790.1%Russia, India, United States
Stability AI25283.2%United States, Germany, Ukraine
Midjourney18673.8%Türkiye, United States, Russia
Runway36241.1%Russia, United Kingdom, Indonesia
HOW TO READ“Total profiles” means people listing the company as their current employer; for high-profile brands (DeepMind, Hugging Face) this noticeably exceeds actual headcount — judge by the RU cohort's absolute numbers, not the shares. The signal is conservative: without a Russian university or the Russian language, a person is not counted — the real numbers are higher. Nebius is a special case: the company, which grew out of Yandex's international assets, is half made up of people with Russian pasts and is worth more than $50bn (mid-2026).
EXHIBIT 28
MODEL

Big Tech: ≈21.5K Russian speakers across the five largest companies

Exact count of employee profiles + RU share from a 30K-per-company sample → estimate
RU cohort estimate · people (model)
Calculation
CompanyProfilesRU shareEstimate
Google487 5801.5%≈7 476
Microsoft664 6541.0%≈6 802
Apple466 7260.7%≈3 158
Amazon209 7181.6%≈3 369
Meta84 5690.9%≈755

Samples of this type understate the share by 22–30% (validated by exact counts) — the estimates are conservative.

WHY IT MATTERSRussian-speaking engineers are a stable part of Big Tech's core workforce, comparable to the headcount of an entire IT company.
EXHIBIT 29
MEASURED

AI roles in the diaspora: ≈18 185 specialists — and the share grows with every wave

ML engineers, data scientists and researchers in the diaspora and the war wave
≈18 185
AI specialists in the diaspora by the weighted model — 1.9% of all who left
9%
of the flagship war wave holds AI roles: in 2022, whole data teams left at once
~400
former Yandex AI engineers are building Nebius — per the FT; our profile count confirms it

The Russian AI school is, above all, MIPT, HSE and the Yandex School of Data Analysis. After 2022 that school physically moved: its alumni now publish from London, Amsterdam and San Francisco. Our count across Nebius profiles: 685 of 1 288 employees (53%) have Russian backgrounds — the largest “Russian-speaking” asset in the global AI economy since the split of Yandex (a $5.2bn deal, July 2024).

WHY IT MATTERSAI talent is the defining shortage of the decade. The Russian-educated diaspora is one of the largest non-American pools of that talent, already redistributed across Western and Middle Eastern jurisdictions.
07
Practice + methodology

Benchmarks for the market — and how it was all counted

The diaspora is a market: the largest labeled pool of Russian-speaking senior talent outside Russia. This chapter holds the summary tables for decision-making and the full methodology with its limitations.

EXHIBIT 30
MEASURED

Country profiles of the diaspora: a summary table for decisions

Countries with a sufficient sample: structure, seniority, entrepreneurship, top city
CountryDiaspora (floor)IT shareSenior+FoundersTop city
United States444 0239%20%2.4%New York
Germany217 40022%21%4.2%Berlin
Poland109 56920%27%3.8%Warsaw
United Kingdom99 65119%28%4.3%London
Türkiye70 05013%18%6.5%Istanbul
Spain64 66020%22%4.2%Barcelona
Israel63 56130%21%3.9%Tel Aviv
Georgia59 07035%27%3.8%Tbilisi
Kazakhstan58 16720%28%2.0%Almaty
Netherlands55 00114%15%4.9%Amsterdam
Armenia46 30730%28%4.2%Yerevan
Switzerland44 71513%23%7.5%Zurich
UAE44 02715%32%7.5%Dubai
Czechia41 22521%30%1.8%Prague
Finland39 17117%17%3.0%Helsinki
HOW TO READ“Diaspora (floor)” is the lower bound: profiles explicitly listing Russian. IT share, senior+ and founders come from the classified sample within each country. The key arbitrage: comparable senior talent costs differently in Belgrade and London — the table shows where concentration runs highest.
EXHIBIT 31
MEASURED

Where to find whom: a concentration map by occupation

Top countries by share of each function's holders (weighted)
Who you are looking forWhere concentration is highest (share of the function's holders, %)
Data & AI (≈25 305 (model))United States 18.8% · UAE 7.1% · Netherlands 7% · France 6% · Germany 5.5%
IT engineering (≈117 362 (model))United States 27% · Germany 10.2% · Serbia 5.3% · Georgia 5.2% · Kazakhstan 5.2%
Design (≈21 680 (model))United States 14.6% · Germany 11.3% · Georgia 6.2% · Spain 6% · Netherlands 5.1%
Product (≈11 978 (model))United States 13.2% · Germany 12.8% · United Kingdom 9.3% · Netherlands 9.2% · Spain 7.2%
Marketing & PR (≈35 449 (model))United States 31.3% · Germany 9.5% · Indonesia 5.6% · UAE 5.5% · Spain 4.9%
Finance (≈30 240 (model))United States 52.4% · UAE 4.9% · Kazakhstan 3.8% · Netherlands 3.7% · Canada 2.9%
Science & academia (≈13 682 (model))United States 58% · Germany 9% · Israel 3.3% · Netherlands 3.2% · Spain 3.2%
Media & content (≈22 264 (model))United States 49.9% · Türkiye 5.7% · Italy 4.6% · Indonesia 4.5% · Canada 3.9%
Executives & owners (≈30 530 (model))United States 36.4% · Kazakhstan 7.8% · UAE 7.5% · Germany 4.5% · Spain 4.2%
Medicine (≈10 028 (model))United States 47.4% · Canada 8.8% · UAE 8.1% · United Kingdom 5.5% · Italy 5.1%
PRACTICAL TAKEAWAYAssemble an ML team in the US, London and Belgrade; game development in Cyprus and Serbia; marketing and content in Turkey, the UAE and Spain; research in the university centers of the US and Germany.
EXHIBIT 32
MEASURED

How reachable the diaspora is: contact coverage

Measured on a cohort of 16,677 diaspora profiles joined to the contact data layers
75.7%
of the cohort can be identified for direct contact through the business-email layer — measured, not estimated
11.7%
carry an extended dossier: personal addresses, social accounts, employment beyond the résumé
100%
are covered by a full career profile: dated position history, education, skills, languages — 95+ fields

What the data lacks and what we refuse to do: phone numbers are practically absent for this cohort (<1%), and we do not “reconstruct” them; missing values ship as NULL, not as a guess.

WHY IT MATTERSThe usual line about the diaspora is that “these people can be neither seen nor surveyed.” This population is visible: measurable, segmentable and reachable with known coverage.
METHODOLOGY.LOG — HOW EVERYTHING WAS COUNTED
Subject
Russian-speaking professionals who left Russia; working definition — career footprints: Russian education, employment at flagship companies, Russian language in the profile
Dataset
1.17 billion career profiles; measurements across 30 countries; 12 916 diaspora profiles classified in detail
Signal 1 · Education
Text classification of educational institutions (Cyrillic + transliteration, 52 named universities + generic patterns). University identifiers are sparse in the data — classification is text-only
Signal 2 · Employer
Dated positions at 10 flagships (Yandex, Sber, T-Bank, MTS, Kaspersky, Ozon, Avito, VK, Gazprom, Wildberries); 69,142 unique leavers since 2019
Signal 3 · Language
Russian in the languages block (all spelling variants). Weak but massive: even among known-Russian professionals, only 39.5% list languages
Calibration
Against 69,142 known-Russian professionals: education is filled in for 93.1% and recognized as Russian for 75.1% — the coefficient for converting measured floors into model estimates
Validation
Sample shares were validated by exact counts in three countries: samples understate by 22–30% — all sample figures are published as lower bounds, uncorrected
Weighting
Summary distributions are country-weighted: weight = (the country's Russian-education share × profile population) / sample rows — otherwise fixed samples overstate small hubs
Departure dating
The year the last position with an explicit Russian location ended; 5 665 datable departures; 49.5% after January 1, 2022
Edition
3rd: adds the “How they have settled” chapter, experience, employer categories, community age, skills. All data queries ran on June 12, 2026

Why the figures are lower bounds. Every step is conservative: samples underrepresent new profiles (we apply no correction); the education signal loses a quarter of even known-Russian résumés; the language signal catches only one in three; a person with no recognized signal is not counted at all. The diaspora's true size exceeds the published estimates — a deliberate choice in favor of verifiability.

What we do not claim. We do not measure citizenship or ethnicity — only career footprints. We cannot tell “left for good” from “has long lived abroad” outside datable cases. We do not add overlapping signals into a single “grand total.”

Platform coverage. Career profiles see internationally oriented white-collar workers; blue-collar trades and offline businesses are underrepresented.
Update lag. Profiles get updated late — the 2024–2025 tail of the departure curves is understated more than other points.
Location is self-reported. Digital nomads and dual bases add noise in both directions.
The post-Soviet commonality. The language signal includes Russian speakers without Russian backgrounds; for strict estimates, use the education signal.
Profiles ≠ headcount. “Company employees” are people listing it as their current employer; close to headcount, but not equal to it.
Classifiers. Occupations and seniority are recognized from job-title text; rare phrasings fall into “other.”

External sources (vetted for citability):

Re:Russia (2023) — 820–920K who left by mid-2023 · The Bell (2024) — ~650K remaining abroad · Russia's Ministry of Digital Development (2022) — ~100K IT specialists who left · J. Wachs, EPJ Data Science (2023) — 11.1% of Russian open-source developers changed country by November 2022 · OutRush / EUI (2023–24) — ≤8% returned; >45% of the emigration in IT; 80% with degrees · Novaya Gazeta Europe (2024) — ≥2,500 scientists severed Russian affiliations · FT (2024) — the $5.2bn split of Yandex's assets; ~1,300 employees in the international part · MacroPolo Global AI Talent Tracker 2.0 (2024) — Russia's growing share of top-tier AI researchers, the role of MIPT · IMF (2023) — Armenia's GDP +12.6% in 2022 on the inflow from Russia · European Parliament (2023) — 789 companies and 2,134 sole proprietorships registered by Russian citizens in Serbia.

What we deliberately do not cite: “4 million who left” (border crossings, not people), extrapolations from small surveys, “two-thirds of IT specialists have returned” (methodology undisclosed; independent surveys put it at ≤8%), and SIM-card counts (which cannot tell a return from a visit).