[MrDisposable]

Russian here. No, I'm not prepping in the traditional sense of the word (e.g. a bunker, a stockpile of canned food and ammo, iodine, books on survival etc.).

All my prepping is Russia-specific: making sure that my commercial VPN is paid for 3 years in advance, my self-hosted VPN is up and running, a European friend's credit card is added everywhere as the billing method, etc. My next work PC will run on Linux (normally I'm a Windows guy), and we had a lot of discussions about what we can do if our Internet "suddenly" becomes "sovereign".

No idea what to do about bricked iOS and Android phones yet.

[Ourgon]

WRT those phones, if they can connect to your own system at home you can run a tunnel - Wireguard, OpenVPN or anything similar - to it and escape to the outside that way. This is more or less the same method as used to safely use public Wifi networks.

[pabs3]

Sounds like you're staying in Russia? I read there is already a flood of tech people out of the country.

[MrDisposable]

There absolutely is a flood. Mostly to Armenia and Georgia.

As for me, I'm torn on staying vs leaving. This may seem irrational (and it probably is), but this is my home. I'll be perfectly fine in any European country on a day-to-day level, but I'll never be at home (and I'll need a thicker skin since we're the nazis now). There are people and places in Russia that I love, and my life won't be complete without them. I guess I'm just old.

On the other hand, we may soon live in a Gulag. I'm already cleaning the history of some of my Telegram chats when I go outside. People are getting arrested for holding a sign with asterisks ("*** *****") or just a blank sheet of paper, and you can get a prison term for a careless repost.

On the third hand, Russia may crumble. Our resources aren't unlimited. We are under the heaviest sanctions in history, our industry is a sham, our energy exports will cease in a couple of years, we've already committed 70% of our military to the war, and this won't end even if we "win" -- we'll need to provide police / counter-guerilla presence over a country that's 30 times (times, not percent!) larger than Chechnya, for at least a decade. And we'll need to rebuild a couple of Stalingrads to boot. I can't see how this is sustainable.

TL;DR: Decisions are hard.

[pabs3]

I can definitely understand that feeling of home. I wish you good luck with either choice. The people of neither country deserve the current situation nor the consequences of what is happening.