[Yizahi]

You and maybe other emigrant citizens can be completely opposing war. I'm not disputing that since I don't know you.

Point 1 - I was discussing action of a corporation, not an individual. And that corporation has 1 (one) single office in the whole vast Europe, and it's in a country known to be a base of other similar trade arrangements. It is not an evidence, but it is a big hint based on more than a decade of other cases.

Point 2 - regarding "one of the rare few options", as far a I know not a single EU country has or had a complete ban on immigration of Russian citizens. A few minor tweaks were made, most of them recent, after already a decade of war, like restricting only some subset of visas or restricting asylum seekers etc. Czechia had some bigger restriction just in 2025 afaik. But in most of the EU countries Russian citizen can legally immigrate and work.

[jimbohn]

I know I sound pedantic, but he didn't say he opposes the war (nor the regime), just that he doesn't want to be involved.

[Tadpole9181]

Yeah, they were asked explicitly and danced around the question. Really seems like they don't mind the invasion of a sovereign nation and murder of its people - they just don't want to accept any personal risk.

[jimbohn]

IMO russian culture/society, starting from the very early days of the empire, is drenched with imperialism and essentially a genocidal nature. This can be found from the lower strata of their society to the upper end, including authors like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pushkin, etc. Sadly for them (and especially their neighbours), the transformation from empire to soviet and later to empire again hasn't changed this factor.

For some reason, there is an implicit assumption, in that culture, of their superiority w.r.t. anybody that isn't American. I heard funny stories from a professor in the US telling that russians were the only PHD students that he felt like were acting as if he was beneath them, because he was "just" a Western European rather than an American (he had citizenship, but anyway).

This might get me a bunch of downvotes, but it's an unsolved problem that Europe refuses to face, and it has blown up in Europe's face pretty hard. It would be better for everybody involved to dismember russia so that it doesn't have the different *Stans to draw resources and cannon fodder from; but good luck with that. It's likely more pragmatic to "manage" them while they grind themselves out of any significance, but that is costing and will cost more lives.