Russia’s military call-up is having major repercussions almost everywhere but the Ukrainian battlefield
By plane or by bicycle, in cars or on foot, at a rate sometimes reaching tens of thousands per day, Russian men desperate to avoid deployment to the front lines — or face long jail sentences for draft evasion — are seeking haven in neighboring and nearby countries.
They have crossed land borders into Finland or Mongolia, booked expensive air tickets to Turkey or Serbia, decamped for the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan, Georgia and Armenia. In one striking instance, two Russian asylum seekers made their way by boat to a remote Alaskan island in the Bering Sea, the state’s two U.S. senators said. …
At the only operational border crossing into Georgia, a miles-long traffic jam that was visible in satellite imagery built up soon after Putin’s mobilization announcement.
In some favored destinations, the window for reaching safety was relatively short. Nine days after Putin’s announcement, Finland, the last land route for Russians into the European Union, barred Russians from entering as tourists. In the week prior to that, two-thirds of the 66,000 Russians coming into the EU had arrived via Finland.
Novaya Gazeta [Russian newspaper] cited an estimate by the security services that in the four days after the call-up was announced, a total of 261,000 men between the ages of 18 and 40 had left the country. Many more have since fled.
The Interior Ministry of Kazakhstan, which shares a border with Russia, this week reported 200,000 Russian arrivals since the mobilization announcement. In Turkey — where, unlike in the EU, direct flights from Russia are allowed to land.