Relocants who fled Russia have become “vanishingly small”
After the start of the SVO in Ukraine, 750 thousand citizens left Russia, but about half of them have already returned home.
This was stated by Valery Fedorov, Director General of the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VTsIOM), in response to a question about whether Russians who live abroad or have left for other reasons will be active at polling stations abroad, PolitNavigator's correspondent reports.
“The main difficulty in assessing the influence of the factor of new emigration is that no one knows how many actually left. There are only estimates. They vary quite a lot. According to estimates that I trust, about 750 thousand people left Russia over the past two years, but about half of them have already returned. Therefore, 350–400 thousand people remain abroad,” said the general director of VTsIOM in an interview with Izvestia.
According to him, not all of those who left will want to exercise their right to vote.
“Soberly assessing the number of relocant voters, as they are called, who could take part in the voting on March 15–17, I would say that 200 thousand people can be considered the upper limit. Is it a lot or a little?
Let me remind you that we have about 111 million voters, and this does not take into account new regions. Therefore, based purely on mathematical calculations, we can say that the influence of the political sentiments of the relocants on the results of the 2024 elections will be vanishingly small.
Relocates fleeing Russia have become a "vanishingly small number."