Conflicts

While Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been going on for more than two years, the Kremlin leader is facing a major problem (which he certainly would not have anticipated when he started his special operation): its loosing its intellectuals.

This is explained by professor of economics at the London Business School, Richard Portes, in an interview with American media outlet Business Insider. At the start of the conflict, nearly a million Russians fled. According to a paper, published in July 2023 by the IFRI (French Institute of International Relations), 80% of them had a university degree and 86% were under 45 years old. The cherry on the cake? This exodus cost Russia 38 billion euros. Indeed, many of these Russians had made a fortune. When they left, they took all their savings with them, particularly to Dubai.

Added to this is a brain drain… and in the long term, it's a drastic decrease in human and intellectual capital that is bound to threaten the country. As Richard Portes points out: “whatever the outcome of the war, in five years, Russia will have exhausted its physical capital, except in the defense sector, and will have lost a huge amount of intellectual capital and human capital […]. Take someone who finished their higher education ten or fifteen years ago, who invents something or designs software. You can’t replace someone like that with a new graduate.”

Moscow would then be faced with a regression and could go from a so-called developed economy (strong industry) to an underdeveloped economy, relying more on the exploitation of its own natural resources, specifies Korii, with a significant impact on the standard of living of the population.

(MH with Manon Pierre - Source: Korii - Picture: Picture by tatarstan.ru via WikiCommons under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license)