“Live there well, and never come back,” people in Russia sing ironically to their departing friends at good-bye parties, which are now as omnipresent as Zoom meetings were in the beginning of the pandemic. As friend circles, work teams, families, and neighborhoods gradually become half empty, torn, and filled with silence, irony is a great coping mechanism.
Russians have been leaving the country since the very beginning of the war in Ukraine. The borders are still open, even with the draft going on. Leaving seems to be implicitly approved of by the government, and some people are even quite openly presented with the choice between emigration and jail (such as the opposition politician Ilya Yashin, who chose the second option).
