Latvia Looks Good to Russians Unhappy With Putin

Oksana Bratislavskaya says she’s never had any illusions about Russia, where she was born and has lived all her 37 years. The politically liberal lawyer says she and her husband, an IT expert, have grown estranged from the Russia of Vladimir Putin. “We have always been foreigners here. They call us ‘Westernizers,’ ‘the fifth column,’ or ‘national traitors’—in Stalin’s and Hitler’s fashion.” But it was the war in Ukraine that left the couple “without oxygen,” as she puts it. “We were appalled by the scale of public support for the annexation of Crimea and the subsequent war in Ukraine,” she says.

So Bratislavskaya’s family joined the latest wave of emigration, which is almost entirely composed of highly skilled middle-class urbanites frustrated by the war in Ukraine and the suppression of the democratic opposition under Putin. They’re heading for European countries such as Latvia, where they can get residence permits in exchange for investment, most typically in property. Hungary, Poland, Finland, Spain, and Greece offer similar deals.