Last year, CASE conducted a study polling the Russian immigrants living in the four countries of the E.U.: Germany, France, Poland, and Cyprus. Our next step was to apply the same methodology to our examination of the Russian immigrants living in the post-Soviet republics. Based on a number of research metrics, this new area has been found to sit right between the average Russian residents and the Russian exiles in the E.U.
As was the case in last year’s study, the subjects were mostly recruited using public channels and chat groups accommodating the Russian-speaking émigré communities. We also posted notices on social media and turned to the news websites. However, the number of respondents who agreed to fill out the questionnaire, representing the countries within our focus area, proved to trail to that polled in the E.U. immigration study last year by orders of magnitude1.
1 — The potential explanation behind these behavioral differences may be the following. 1) Compared to those in the E.U., the Russians that ended up in the CIS countries are at a much higher political risk of having their personal data disclosed. This has to do with the policy of both the Russian government and the governments of host countries. 2) There are much fewer instances of the Russians living in the CIS countries holding a residence permit of citizenship of the host country than those living in the E.U. Perhaps, that factor makes the respondents much more apprehensive of the consequences of the privacy leaks.
The number of questionnaires submitted in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Armenia, and Moldova is insufficient to draw statistically significant conclusions about the specific characteristics of the samples in each of these countries individually. A statistically significant sample was only obtained for Georgia. After identifying other relevant research subjects, we managed to collect a sufficient number of questionnaires about the Russian exiles in Serbia.
Given the above, we had to adopt a somewhat unconventional approach to pooling the data for presenting the research findings. Georgia and Serbia will be analyzed separately, using the same methodology as the one that was employed in the E.U. study, while the questionnaires submitted by the respondents in other former Soviet republics will be clustered under the “CIS countries.”
A total of 1,111 respondents from Georgia, Serbia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Moldova were surveyed. The study was conducted in the spring of 2025.
Due to the difficulty finding the respondents, we were unable to form a sample whose socio-demographic characteristics would be comparable to those of the sample from the previous study on the E.U. countries. The two particularly significant differences are as follows:
- the average age of respondents in the current study on the CIS and Serbia is 36 versus 44 in the E.U. study;
- the share of those who left Russia after the start of the Russia–Ukraine war is many times higher in the CIS and Serbia sample than among the Russian immigrants in the E.U.
These differences substantially affect the validity of certain comparisons between the two studies’results. In particular, these sample differences most likely explain why immigrants in the CIS countries tend to assess the Putin regime more critically and voice more support for Ukraine than the Russian immigrants in the E.U.
It is essential to keep these differences in mind for all subsequent comparisons—this important remark applies across the report. Given the asymmetric composition and size of the sample, we can confidently point to the impact of the age-, country-, wave-, or other group-specific features only when quantitative differences tally 10 percentage points or more. Beginning with deviations of around five percentage points, one may cautiously infer some degree of a group-specific tendency. Smaller discrepancies can be ruled out as a basis for unambiguous conclusions.
The noticeably high proportion of IT professionals represented in the sample from the CIS and Serbia reflects the broader reach of this demographic via the communication channels available to us rather than the actual share of such specialists among the Russian immigrants in these countries.
The principal hypothesis of last year’s study on the Russian immigrants in the E.U. was that political attitudes toward the Putin regime and the conflict in Ukraine would differ across three waves of emigration: those who departed from Russia before 2014; those who moved between 2014 and 2022; and those who left after the start of the Ukraine war. This conjecture was fully corroborated.
In the current study, however, this framework proved irrelevant, as 93% of our respondents emigrated after the start of the war. Therefore, in analyzing the obtained data, we focused primarily on comparing our sample with immigrants in the E.U. and with the average Russian citizen.
Methodologically, this study reproduced the questions of last year’s survey of the Russian immigrants in the E.U., while debuting a number of new questions on the following topics: attitudes toward the conflicts surrounding Karabakh, Kosovo, and Abkhazia; respondents’plans regarding further relocation to another country and their observations on where immigrants from their social circles have recently moved; and, in terms of the emigration waves, we introduced an additional distinction between those who moved between February and September 2022 and those who left after September 2022.