It was already suggested to use US humanitarian parole program to to give refuge to surrendering soldiers. Anything making it easier to get work permits will help, too. When I applied for a Blue Card in Germany last year, it took about a month, and I needed lots of notarized translations of documents, which are expensive. An H1B visa in USA takes half a year to get.
There are flights into some countries like Armenia, Georgia, Serbia. Yes, I think the main problem is people don’t have a lot of money, and sometimes cannot access the money because of new Russian laws and sanctions. And rent became 2x-3x more expensive in Erevan. So people are not sure if they can make it. But I am not one of the people who recently left, I think they understand the situation better.
Hello everyone!
I am a human rights activist from Russia. I work as a ML scientist at a medical tech startup in Germany. When the war with Ukraine started 8 years ago, I decided to record an antiwar video as a reply to Ukrainian students. It was my first time trying to organize a protest, and it was way scarier than just participating. What if one of the students got expelled for this? What if at the rally I’d organize in their support someone got accused of hitting a cop? Suddenly it looked like my little initiative could turn into a years-long nightmare. I decided to do it and was very glad to discover that an Open Russia journalist had the same idea and we could merge our efforts.
No one got in trouble for the recording, but it didn’t change anything, either. So I went looking for more effective ways to help Ukraine and free my own country. As protests in Russia dwindled, I decided that building a friendly AI was my best bet. I got into machine learning, read most books on MIRI’s reading list and was in the middle of a MIRI interview when COVID struck and they stopped hiring programmers. My plan no longer called for staying in Russia, so I moved to Germany last year, to stop supporting Putin’s war and oppression with my taxes.