Russians Fleeing As Nation Faces Economic Collapse

Russians Fleeing As Nation Faces Economic Collapse

Desperate people stand in long lines to pay for her purchases at an IKEA near Moscow on Thursday, ... [+] March 3, 2022. IKEA closed all its stores and pausing all sourcing in Russia this weekend. (AP Photo/Vladimir Kondrashov) Russians are fleeing the country as sanctions lead to closed borders, food rationing, and the actual threat of a banking system collapse within days. Emirates, Turkish Airlines, Korean Air are some of the main carriers getting people out of the country. Others are leaving on foot into Estonia and Finland. Oleg Deripaska, a Russian billionaire in the cross hairs of individual sanctions before, said that the country faces an economic catastrophe not unlike 1998. "Multiple that times three," one of Russia's leading industrialists said this weekend. Russia's president Vladimir Putin could not have possibly assumed that Europe, the U. S., indeed much of the world, would back an incursion into the mostly ethnic Russian Donbass region of East Ukraine. Even if the Russians there wanted it following years of what some have referred to as a civil war between Ukrainian nationalists, neo-Nazi militias, and Russian-Ukrainians. NATO expansion, something Ukraine's president Volodomyr Zelensky cannot stop talking about, was at least moderately understood