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| Russia’s Technocrats Embraced the West, Then Enabled Putin’s War | Russia’s Technocrats Embraced the West, Then Enabled Putin’s War |
| (2 days later) | |
| Soon after his airplane took off from Moscow last fall, a Russian energy official who had just resigned took his phone and typed up the emotions he had kept bottled inside since the invasion of Ukraine. | Soon after his airplane took off from Moscow last fall, a Russian energy official who had just resigned took his phone and typed up the emotions he had kept bottled inside since the invasion of Ukraine. |
| “I am tired of feeling constant fear for myself, for my loved ones, for the future of my country and of my own,” Arseny Pogosyan wrote on his social media page as he flew into a hurried exile. “I am against this inhumane war.” | “I am tired of feeling constant fear for myself, for my loved ones, for the future of my country and of my own,” Arseny Pogosyan wrote on his social media page as he flew into a hurried exile. “I am against this inhumane war.” |
| The outburst in September did not receive much attention, gathering eight likes and one brief comment. After all, Mr. Pogosyan, 30, was among the hundreds of thousands of young Russian men fleeing the mobilization announced days earlier by President Vladimir V. Putin to replenish his battered military. | The outburst in September did not receive much attention, gathering eight likes and one brief comment. After all, Mr. Pogosyan, 30, was among the hundreds of thousands of young Russian men fleeing the mobilization announced days earlier by President Vladimir V. Putin to replenish his battered military. |
| But among his colleagues in the energy ministry, where he worked as a press officer, his decision to leave his job was rare. | But among his colleagues in the energy ministry, where he worked as a press officer, his decision to leave his job was rare. |
| Since the war began, Russia has lost droves of tech workers as well as other professionals, a brain drain that analysts say will harm the country’s economy for decades. By contrast, many government employees have fallen in line behind Mr. Putin’s wartime leadership. Almost all senior Russian technocrats and a large majority of their immediate subordinates — officials who guide Russia’s economy — remain in their posts more than a year after the invasion. | |
| Their professional expertise has helped Mr. Putin largely keep the economy afloat in the face of increasingly severe Western sanctions. |