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- [00:03]
Dina Temple Raston
From Recorded Future News and prx, this is. Click here. Two years ago, Stan was living the dream in Russia. He had a thriving tech business, a nice apartment, four kids, and some land outside the city. Most of his friends were doing pretty well, too. They were all Russian entrepreneurs or tech bros with kids who attended private schools and were used to eating at the finest restaurants. We told you Stan's story a few years ago, shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which is about the time things started to turn for him. For one, Stam was against the war, but he was surrounded by people who were very much in favor of it.
- [01:01]
Stan
When you speak with the ordinary people who is working in the shop, maybe most of them are really supporting him. They were so, you know, it can be the problem when.
- [01:15]
Dina Temple Raston
And the problem was when the sanctions hit. When the war started, dominating every conversation, Stan couldn't help but feel the slow, creeping panic. He worried about getting swept up in one of the Kremlin's military mobilization programs. His Western clients started canceling jobs, and his projects dried up. And every day it felt like the walls were closing in.
- [01:44]
Stan
Business. You know, right now, it's like reducing 20% of my revenues.
- [01:53]
Dina Temple Raston
Which is partly why Stan started to wonder if there was a possible solution outside the country, some way to avoid the draft, build his business, and not have to look over his shoulder every time he talked about the war.
- [02:07]
Stan
I was 100% sure a year ago that I don't want to live here anymore.
- [02:17]
Dina Temple Raston
But after a year of living abroad, Stan and his family did something they never expected to do. They went back to Russia. Not because the situation there had dramatically improved. It hadn't. But because exile, it turns out, is exhausting and expensive and kind of lonely. We are hearing that a lot of Russians are returning to Russia. Is that true?
- [02:41]
Stan
It's true. It's true.
- [02:46]
Dina Temple Raston
I'm Dina Templerestin, and this is Click Here, a podcast about all things cyber and intelligence. Every week, we bring you true stories about the people making and breaking our digital world. And today, the strange, complicated journeys of Russian tech workers. People who thought they were leaving their homeland behind forever, only to find themselves drawn back by choice, by necessity, or maybe by something even harder to define. Of the estimated 100,000 tech workers who fled Russia in 2022, relocation firms in Moscow say some 40 to 45% of them have now returned. So today we're digging into why, what it tells us about the unintended consequences of sanctions, the tug of familiarity, and the future of Russia's economy. Stay with us. From recorded Future News. This is Click Here. I'm Dena Temple Rouston. Stan decided to take his family to Southeast Asia because it checked a lot of boxes. We're not sharing all of his details by the way, for his own protection.
- [04:06]
Stan
So the first was can our kids go to English school? Yes, Check mark. The second one was can we live outside of the country for a long time? Yeah, check mark. It was okay.
- [04:21]
Dina Temple Raston
Stan wanted to go somewhere they could afford to live for a while and Southeast Asia checked that box too. So he sold their apartment, packed all their things and flew halfway around the world with four kids and a patient wife to to begin a new life.
- [04:36]
Stan
The first day we came there after three flights, 24 hours without sleep with four kids because I was so tired.
- [04:44]
Dina Temple Raston
As soon as they got the kids settled in their new house, he collapsed into bed and was out cold for hours.
- [04:51]
Stan
When I woke up in the morning, I understood that someone got into the house which I rented.
- [05:00]
Dina Temple Raston
That money he'd hoped would go farther in this new country. Well, $8,000 of it was stolen that very first day. He'd left it on the table when he went to bed.
- [05:10]
Stan
I was unlucky to not to put it in the safe box because I was so tired and like some guy went in and I called the police but no news from them. So it was the first shock for me because it was sum of money for a few months for me.
- [05:34]
Dina Temple Raston
Now he couldn't afford anything beyond the first semester's tuition for the private school he wanted to send his kids to. So he enrolled them in a Russian online school which presented its own set of problems.
- [05:47]
Stan
Every kid was in the house and when you teach the kids online you have to administrate every iPad, every zoom call and you are like running from one to another.
- [06:03]
Dina Temple Raston
Policing the kids was nearly a full time job. So his actual job suffered.
- [06:09]
Stan
My vision was to try to find some English speaking customers worldwide startups. I made some steps in it, but.
- [06:22]
Dina Temple Raston
Things didn't go exactly according to plan. Now Stan had made certain assumptions about leaving Russia. He thought that once he set up outside the country, he'd be able to reach international customers and convince them to work with him. It turns out all his skill and ambition couldn't overcome the fact that he had a passport that said Russia. He had trouble changing money, he had trouble getting paid. He even had trouble opening a bank account. All because of the sanctions.
- [06:58]
Stan
I have accounts in seven countries now. Seven countries just to skip the sanctions.
- [07:10]
Dina Temple Raston
The problem is it doesn't stop there. Let's Say you need to hire legal help or find an investor. Those people might be wary, thinking, is this guy clean or is he connected to the Kremlin somehow? Even if you're just a regular guy with no political ties at all, the suspicion alone might be enough to scare people off. It was a reminder that even thousands of miles away, Russia was still there, casting a shadow. So Stan tried to focus on clients in Southeast Asia, closer to where he was living, but who worked internationally.
- [07:50]
Stan
So I found some clients who worked with worldwide or English speaking customers, with Russian CEOs and so on. But I thought I would find more. I would find more. That was my maybe mistake.
- [08:07]
Dina Temple Raston
So he figured he'd just rely on business from his Russian clients, assuming that the sanctions couldn't take down that corner of his operation. But that had its downside, too. Currency exchange rates took a bite out of whatever he made. And it got to the point where everything seemed hard. The culture felt foreign in a way he hadn't prepared for. And even the beachy weather started to kind of weigh on it.
- [08:37]
Stan
It was so hot, and the climate there was so un. Comfortable for us. When you was four kids, every 20 minutes you are moving, you're doing something, you're already sweating, Wet, so tired.
- [08:55]
Dina Temple Raston
40 degrees, that's 104 degrees Fahrenheit. So not exactly a natural habitat for a big Russian guy like Stan. And this is the thing about moving to a country that's very different than your. You might go there, like Stan, with the idea that things will be better and if there's a good Internet connection, we'll just make it work. And sometimes that's true. But also, even in the best case scenario, there are always a million little things that require a constant adjustment when you're an expat. So after months of managing four young kids in online school while trying to prop up a business, Stan told us that. That his dreams of setting up a new life half a world away just started to unravel. And then this unthinkable thing happened. Stan's youngest son almost drowned.
- [09:52]
Stan
He fell. He fell down into the water. And this circle in the ground, a tidal pool. I was so lucky that like in milliseconds, I saw him falling in the air. I nearly lost his life.
- [10:11]
Dina Temple Raston
And that was the final straw.
- [10:14]
Stan
It wasn't worth it.
- [10:18]
Dina Temple Raston
After that, Stan and his family decided to do something that he would have never considered. Two years ago, they went back to Russia.
- [10:28]
Stan
Coming back, it was like fresh air because we were so tired of everyday routine. With four kids, I'm feeling better here right now. If I take the weather conditions, even when it's dark, you can see it's my evening. This weather is like from 4pm like dark and dark in the morning.
- [10:57]
Dina Temple Raston
And he likes that better, too. When we come back, we look at just what the sanctions are doing to the day to day lives of people like Stan. Stay with us.
- [11:19]
Alexandra Prokopenka
You come to the New Yorker Radio Hour for conversations that go deeper with people you really want to hear from, whether it's Bruce Springsteen or Questlove or Olivia Rodrigo, Liz Cheney or the godfather of artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton, or some of my extraordinarily well informed colleagues at the New Yorker. So join us every week on the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [11:49]
Dina Temple Raston
It is called Internet. I use the World Wide Web information superhighway. Cyber security.
- [11:55]
Alexandra Prokopenka
Why do things go viral?
- [11:57]
Dina Temple Raston
Click here. Here's the thing about sanctions. They're like locks on a door. At first they seem impenetrable. You rattle the knob, turn it back and forth and you can't get through. But then someone finds a way to pick the lock or jimmies open a window or just builds another door. That's what Russia has been doing ever since sanctions began to bite in 2022.
- [12:24]
Ivan Greg
The current state of affairs, I mean, for today is I would say that it's the situation in is not great, but not terrible.
- [12:35]
Dina Temple Raston
This is Alexandra Prokopenka. She's a researcher and fellow at the Carnegie Russian Eurasia center in Berlin. She was part of the Russian exodus. After the war began, she moved to Kazakhstan and then eventually went to Germany for this Carnegie job. As part of her work there, she's been tracking how the sanctions are affecting life in Russia.
- [12:55]
Ivan Greg
Western sanctions probably are working, but not the way as they were expected. And there was a huge exaggeration of expectations at the beginning of the war. And sanctions were supported with the narrative from Western policymakers that they will put Russian economy on their knees.
- [13:15]
Dina Temple Raston
But that's not what happened. Instead, Russia developed a workaround economy. For every sanction, they found a loophole or an alternative which shouldn't be so surprising, according to Ivan Greg. He's a professor of international relations and the director of the Russia Program at George Washington University. He pointed out that Russians have had a lot of practice finding workarounds.
- [13:43]
Unnamed Expert
Those people grew up in the Soviet Union where nothing worked, right? So basically, I mean, you want to get something that goes out of the, you know, out of a standard, then you need to find your way, right? You need to get your own Guy in the store who would bring you something smuggled from the west or, you know, some whatever type of fish you want.
- [14:05]
Dina Temple Raston
Under the Soviets, the government owned most businesses. They set prices and decided what the nation would and wouldn't produce. So when the west announced sanctions, experts thought that making it tough for the government to do business would help convince Putin to stop the war. So let me just ask, at the start of the war, did you think Western sanctions were going to work?
- [14:29]
Unnamed Expert
To be honest, yes. So I was wrong, as many other experts out there. And we just did not consider one thing, that we still treated Russia in many ways as the Soviet Union where the government decides everything. But in fact, there was private business and market that resolved so many issues that the government would never be able to resolve itself.
- [14:54]
Dina Temple Raston
Instead of collapsing when over a thousand foreign companies closed their operations, normal citizens bolstered the economy with ingenuity. Western banks shut down credit cards. So dual citizens just opened up new ones under their other nationality. Retailers imported iPhones to Kazakhstan and then slipped them into Russia. Some people used VPNs to purchase software updates. When a popular app called Notion closed its operations, Russian technologists just created their own version. And Alexander said Russian businesses just added getting around sanctions to the list of things they need to get done during their normal work day.
- [15:34]
Ivan Greg
So every day they are waking up with the fear that sanctions can be tightened. So they need to have plan B, plan C to continue their what they're doing, to continue their daily operations, to continue bringing stuff into Russia or exporting stuff out of Russia. So for them it is a crisis mode which becomes.
- [15:56]
Dina Temple Raston
But the crisis isn't limited to sanctions. In Russia's souped up war economy, there's another problem. Inflation. The price of potatoes has doubled since last year. In December, according to official statistics, the price of cucumbers rose 10% in one week alone. Alexander says all things considered, people are coping better than expected, but things aren't great. That's the way Stan sees it too.
- [16:32]
Stan
It looks the same, only they have problems with prices. Taxi. Taxi now is like 3 or 4x. Before I could afford a great restaurant for my kids. Now the same food is in local McDonald's, same prices.
- [16:55]
Dina Temple Raston
Stan was calling us from his car. It was dark outside and you could see lights in the windows of nearby apartment buildings and colorful Christmas lights in the distance. He told us lots of people had had a hard time making a life outside of Russia. He said just about everyone he talked to said that these tech jobs weren't quite as portable as they thought. But it's not just that. A lot of Russian IT companies are now demanding that workers have to come home.
- [17:21]
Stan
If you are not returning back, you are fired. So the only option is to come back.
- [17:28]
Dina Temple Raston
So when we talked first, there was, you know, two years ago, we talked about the IT brain drain. Right. Everybody leaving. So now is it an IT brain gain, everybody coming back?
- [17:42]
Stan
Yeah. And also the salaries are going up for this kind of stuff. Maybe double. Doubling this, the salaries.
- [17:54]
Dina Temple Raston
Wow.
- [17:55]
Stan
For them, there's a great option, but there's a catch.
- [17:59]
Dina Temple Raston
In order to come back safely, you had to have been very careful on social media while you were gone.
- [18:06]
Stan
You know, some of my friends, they made some, like, posts in Instagram and Facebook about I hate this war and so on. So I think some of them are scared if they come back, they have some problems with police and so on.
- [18:26]
Dina Temple Raston
Did you stay off social media so you could come back?
- [18:29]
Stan
I think I'm safe. But maybe in the beginning of this or I made some posts, but some guys told me, please do not publish this post because you will have some problems in future. Please delete it.
- [18:47]
Dina Temple Raston
It was good advice. Stan says for the people who kept off social media, the return means getting other perks too. Like, for IT workers who come back, companies are actually offering military deferments.
- [19:00]
Stan
They can make, like, safe documents to keep this IT specialists inside the country, not to give them to the army.
- [19:14]
Dina Temple Raston
So Moscow is bending over backwards to bring IT workers back, though it's not just to boost the economy. Tech has a kind of mythic quality for people in Russia. It's one of the few sectors where people thought they could succeed just on merit, not connections. The IT industry was pretty open, and Russian entrepreneurs could lure a lot of foreign capital. Military spending has picked up the slack in the economy where tech workers left off. But military spending is temporary, and the Russian people know it. The Kremlin tells them the economy is just fine, thank you very much. But ordinary Russians can tell it isn't.
- [19:54]
Stan
There is a. It's a common, common phrase.
- [20:00]
Dina Temple Raston
Expression.
- [20:01]
Stan
Yeah. Expression. There is like fridge wins over tv. So if you have nothing in the fridge.
- [20:14]
Dina Temple Raston
So despite all of the things Stan appreciates about being back, he says he can't get away from one thing. Russia is still Russia. It's still a place where speaking freely, saying what you think can land you in jail. There's a reason Stan called us from his car.
- [20:32]
Stan
I'm sitting right now in the. In the car, but if my windows were open, I think there could be some incidents that could say that I'm like an agent like from us or something because there are a lot of crazy people so better not to say anything like dangerous.
- [20:57]
Dina Temple Raston
Despite President elect Trump's vow to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, Stan doesn't believe an end to the war is anywhere in sight.
- [21:06]
Stan
My oldest one is 11 so like if the war is like will continue for eight years so I don't want them to down war so maybe I should make a relocation now or in one year, two years. Not not waiting for this moment to come because I don't know I'm not, I'm not expecting any happy ending here. So I don't know. So maybe I will just grab my kids like in five years. I don't care which, which country will we will live but not here.
- [22:04]
Dina Temple Raston
This is quick here. Here are some of the top cyber and intelligence stories of the past week. Today's Tuesday, January 6th and this is what we've been watching. The Treasury Department is calling this a major breach of its systems by China state sponsored hackers. In a new letter to Congress, the department says hackers were able to infiltrate a third party software provider. According to the Treasury Department letter, hackers infiltrated Beyond Trust, a third party software service provider, and used the keys they stole to access workstations at the Treasury. The hackers seemed particularly interested in unclassified information from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, or ofac, which administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions. Chinese backed hackers have been on a bit of a spree recently. Recently in late September Salt typhoon, a Chinese government linked hacking group was linked to a hack on nine major U.S. telecommunications networks, including AT&T and Verizon. The incident served as a major wake up call, with the US Government now encouraging victims there. And really all Americans use encrypted messaging platforms. Officials believe one of the reasons Beijing accessed the data is not so much to listen to ordinary Americans, but instead to gain insight into spies the United States might be pursuing. A spokesperson for China's Foreign Ministry told Bloomberg that the US Needs to stop using cybersecurity to smear and slander China. The FCC is preparing to vote this month on a rule that would require telecom providers to set and submit their cybersecurity practices every year or face fines. White House cyber czar Ann Neuberger said she hopes that the FCC includes a requirement that firms segment their networks so, quote, even if an attacker like the Chinese government gets access to a network, they're controlled and they're contained. Neuberger went on to explain that in one telecom company's case, a single administrator account had access to Uber over 100,000 routers. So when the Chinese compromise their account, they gain broad access across the entire network. There are still parts of the hack they're trying to uncover, trying to figure out where the hackers are and to try to kick them out. In response to that Chinese attack, the Biden administration is moving to ban the few remaining operations of China Telecom in the United States. The Commerce Department issued a preliminary finding that the company presence in American networks and its cloud services posed a national security risk to the United States. The company has 30 days to respond, meaning that the decision on a final ban will almost certainly be up to the Trump administration. And finally, a coda on what seems to have been a US Obsession with drones this winter. We have no evidence at this time that the reported drone sightings pose a a national security or a public safety threat or have a foreign nexus. After months of these mysterious drone reports, the Biden administration said it was considering a new rule that would restrict or ban some foreign made drones in the United States. In a notice, the Commerce Department said the involvement of foreign adversaries, notably China and Russia, in the design, development and manufacture and supply supply of drones could pose an undue or unacceptable risk to US national security. The notice requested private companies comment on the scope and implications of the rule by March 4th. Today's episode was produced by Megan Dietrich, Sean Powers and Erica Gajda and me, Dina Temple Raston. It was edited by Karen Duffin, Fact Checked by Darren Ancrum, and contains original music by Ben Levington with some other music by Blue Dot Sessions. Our staff writer is Lucas Riley and our illustrator is Megan Gough. Martin Peralta is our sound designer and engineer. Click Here is a production of Recorded Future News. We'll be back on Friday with a new episode of Mic Drop.
- [26:36]
Unnamed Announcer
Looking for more of the cybersecurity and intelligence coverage you get on Click Here, then check out our sister publication the Record from Recorded Future News. You'll get breaking cyber news from reporters in New York, Washington, London and Kyiv, among others, and you'll see for yourself why it attracts hundreds of thousands of page views every month. Just go to the Record Media.