Bogdan Leonov, a Russian citizen, is building a chain of power bank rental stations in Cyprus and Greece and setting up a franchise in Portugal. His startup WE53, founded in 2023, has already recorded annual sales of around 600,000 euros and now employs dozens of people. The network currently includes almost 3,000 stations. Leonov’s earlier idea provided the same service in Russia.<\/p>\n
Setting up a company abroad was a particular challenge as he had to learn all the operational activities from scratch himself. Even \u201creplicating\u201d your own success in a new environment was anything but easy. "You can hardly copy and paste anything. Infrastructure, labor law, cultural behavior – everything is different. The biggest pain for me is the banking business. Sometimes I have to work as a compliance officer myself," he said.<\/p>\n
Maksim Satanovsky, another Russian citizen now living in the German city of Dresden, started a dumpling business and delivered homemade dumplings to customers. He also thought about opening a restaurant serving Russian cuisine, but instead started a factory called Dawaj-Dawaj, which produces dumplings and other frozen foods.<\/p>\n
Hundreds of thousands of Russians have fled their homeland since Moscow launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. They have emigrated to countries such as Israel, Armenia, Georgia, and other European countries to try to build a new life. Some have turned to entrepreneurship, setting up new companies and start-ups abroad – in a wide range of sectors ranging from IT and media to bookstores and dumpling factories.<\/p>\n
The Dutch company Nebius offers graphics processing units (GPUs) for training AI models and was created last year after it was spun off from Russian internet giant Yandex. Yandex was nicknamed \u201cRussia’s Google\u201d because it combined its own search engine with a range of digital services such as email and maps. The company’s global expansion plans suffered a setback due to the Ukraine War.<\/p>\n
Even some Russian civil society actors who have fled the country in recent years are setting up organizations abroad to continue their work. Babel Books, for example, is a Russian-language bookstore in Berlin founded by Natalya Smirnova. The bookstore has now developed into an intellectual center for Russian speakers in the German capital.<\/p>\n
Freedom Letters, the largest and fastest developing Russian publisher in exile, is one of the suppliers for Babel Books. The company’s motto is: \u201cBooks that no longer exist in Russia.\u201d To survive, such companies must be extremely careful and inventive, says Georgy Urushadze, founder of Freedom Letters, adding that they rely heavily on volunteers.<\/p>\n
Entrepreneurs and tech talent leaving Russia is not new, but the trend has accelerated since the start of the Ukraine war. The emigrants are predominantly young, educated people who come primarily from large, digitalized urban areas with developed infrastructure and a highly competitive business environment. Significant companies founded abroad by Russian tech specialists in the last two decades include Revolut, a successful British fintech app, and messaging service Telegram. The longer the war lasts, the less likely these businessmen will return to Russia. At the same time, other countries will benefit as Russian talent launches new ventures abroad \u2013 some of which could become the next Telegram or Revolut.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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