‘I no longer have a country’: Antiwar Russians who fled unlikely to return

Huge waves of Russians left after the Ukraine war began. Many still feel a sense of guilt over the conflict.

Evgeniy Kosgorov, a 38-year-old from Krasnodar, left Russia in June 2022 with his wife and a one-month-old son in his arms.

Since the invasion of Ukraine, he has seen his homeland as a villainous state bound to follow the path of Nazi Germany, a country with no future and one he wanted nothing to do with.

But even in Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital and his adopted home, Russia kept haunting him. His passport and language identify him as a citizen of an aggressor state – someone who preferred to leave than confront the government. He has also been seen as someone who did not react when Russia was becoming the country it is now.

“I understand perfectly well the general hatred for Russians and for everything Russian. I accept and understand it because what Russia is doing is wrong,” Kosgorov told Al Jazeera. “Every time I want to say that it’s difficult for the Russians who left, something inside me protests, because Ukrainians have it more difficult than us.”

According to estimates, up to one million out of some 144 million Russians left the country in 2022 and 2023 in what has been the largest brain drain since the collapse of the Soviet Union.