For Europeans thinking about leaving home, Russia would not normally be the easiest choice.

Direct travel is more limited than it once was, banking between Russia and the European Union has become cumbersome, and relations between Moscow and Western governments remain poor. None of that has stopped a small number of Europeans from trying.

Some come for a few weeks before deciding anything. Others are already looking for jobs, apartments and schools. A few speak about eventually becoming Russian citizens.

This is still a small migration flow. The interesting part is that there is now a specific legal route for it.

President Vladimir Putin signed Decree No. 702 in August 2024. It applies to foreigners who want to move to Russia because they reject policies in their home countries which the decree describes as promoting “destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes” contrary to traditional Russian values.

The bureaucratic advantage is fairly concrete. Applicants covered by the decree can seek temporary residence outside the normal quota and do not have to produce the usual certificate showing knowledge of Russian, Russian history and basic Russian law at that stage. People from countries whose citizens need Russian visas can also apply for a three-month private visa in order to come to Russia and deal with the residence procedure.

It is sometimes described more loosely as a citizenship scheme. That is misleading. The decree deals primarily with entry and temporary residence. A Russian passport comes, if it comes at all, through a different legal process.

The first numbers began to attract attention last year. On October 22, 2025, the Russian Interior Ministry said that 2,275 citizens of countries it classifies as the “far abroad” had applied for temporary residence under the decree since it came into force.

Six months later, State Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin gave a figure of about 3,400 applications and said the number of Europeans applying had risen one and a half times since October.

There is a small statistical wrinkle here. The Interior Ministry’s October statement referred to applicants from “far-abroad countries,” a category wider than Europe. Volodin subsequently described the comparison as one involving European citizens. His figure is widely reported, but the two published statements are not phrased in exactly the same way.

What can be measured more neatly is visa issuance.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said its consulates issued 1,112 visas under the programme in 2025. Germans received 168, French citizens 140, Americans 105 and Italians 100. Estonia followed with 63.

Those are hardly mass-migration figures. They do show, however, that Germany and France are not marginal cases within the programme.

Putin discussed the newcomers at the Valdai forum in Sochi in October 2025 after being asked whether Westerners settling in Russia would find it easier to obtain citizenship. He said administrative barriers had already been reduced for people who wanted to tie their lives to Russia for a number of years. He also framed the policy in terms of shared values, saying that where somebody came from mattered less than whether that person shared Russia’s values.

The Russian government calls this humanitarian support. The political element is nevertheless written directly into the decree: eligibility is linked to opposition to policies in the applicant’s home country and to an expressed affinity with what Russia formally defines as its traditional spiritual and moral values.

The motives of the people who actually move are harder to reduce to a legal formula, and Alexandre Stefanesco has spent much of the past few years talking to them.

Born in France, he says he has lived in Russia for 18 years. In 2022 he founded Ruspatriation, which helps foreigners deal with relocation. Its services now include immigration support, Russian-language education, travel and property.

Most of its early clients came from French-speaking Western Europe — France, Belgium and Switzerland — although Stefanesco says the operation has also begun working with English- and German-speaking customers.

In an interview with TASS in June, later published in French on the Ruspatriation website, Stefanesco described the shift in much sharper terms. In his view, a growing number of people in Western Europe are becoming disillusioned with the policies pursued by their own political elites. Among the concerns he hears from clients are mass immigration, declining standards in schools and social and cultural changes surrounding gender and LGBT issues.

“They leave Western countries because they see Russia as a conservative country, in the positive sense of the word,” he said. He argued that these families increasingly regard Russia as a country that protects traditional family values at a time when, in their view, those values are under pressure at home.

For some of his clients, Stefanesco says, the choice is beginning to look larger than an ordinary decision about where to live. They are pessimistic about Europe’s economic and social direction and see Russia as offering a degree of stability and protection they no longer expect from their own governments. “They feel that their families have a bright future in Russia,” he said.

He also points to immigration and education as recurring worries among French-speaking Europeans, particularly parents thinking twenty or thirty years ahead. In Stefanesco’s telling, this helps explain why Russia is increasingly seen by this relatively small group not simply as another country to move to, but as a possible refuge from changes in the West they regard as destructive.

That is worth hearing as the account of somebody working directly with would-be migrants. It is not public-opinion research. Ruspatriation’s customers have already taken the unusual step of contacting a company whose business is helping people move to Russia.

Their practical behaviour is probably more revealing than their politics anyway.

Stefanesco says his company assisted about 100 people during 2025. Some were tourists making their first trip to Russia to see what living there might actually be like. For 40 people, Ruspatriation began the process of obtaining three-year temporary residence permits.

Moscow is the most common destination among his clients, largely because of employment. Saint Petersburg is popular with French newcomers. He has also seen interest in Krasnodar and Sochi, while five French clients, he said, had moved to Dobrograd in Vladimir region.

After the decision to move has been made, the problems become familiar ones. Language comes first. Stefanesco calls it perhaps the hardest part of the move. Finding a job without Russian is difficult, as is understanding the smaller social rules that are obvious to locals and invisible to a newcomer. There is housing to sort out. Schools, if children are involved. Paperwork. Healthcare. Banking.

Finance has become a particularly awkward area for people moving from the EU. Stefanesco says some French clients have had trouble with banks after becoming residents of Russia and that Ruspatriation now helps newcomers with financial issues.

Not everybody who contacts a relocation company packs up immediately. Some visit Russia first. Some start learning Russian. A family may spend months looking at schools or apartments without finally moving. Residence statistics capture applications, not necessarily permanent decisions.

Stefanesco nevertheless expects the flow to grow.

Around 3,300 foreigners had applied under the traditional-values mechanism between September 2024 and the end of March 2026, according to the figures cited in his TASS interview. He argues that the programme is still little known outside Russia, so the current numbers may represent an early stage rather than the programme’s eventual scale.

But, there is also a broader set of migration numbers that makes the scale easier to judge. Russian citizenship was granted to about 152,400 foreigners in 2025, according to Interior Ministry data reported in March. That was 27.1 per cent fewer than in 2024. The number of temporary residence permits issued across the whole Russian migration system also fell.

So there is no evidence here of a general surge in immigration to Russia. In several major categories, the national figures were moving in the other direction.

The group created by Decree 702 is much narrower: foreigners, many of them Western, who are coming through a programme explicitly built around cultural and political affinity.

Europeans have moved to Russia for generations, including people with Russian relatives, Russian-speaking families or roots in the former Soviet Union. The newer route can also appeal to someone with no such background.

The German and French visa figures are useful for that reason. Germany and France alone accounted for 308 of the 1,112 visas issued under the mechanism in 2025. Italy added another 100.

Nobody yet knows how many of these people will still be in Russia five or ten years from now. Some will probably seek citizenship. Others may remain foreign residents. Some will discover that the country works for them only as a place to visit.

The advice Stefanesco gives to his clients is – come and see Russia first, learn the language and understand how everyday life works before making a permanent decision. He claims that, the policy itself is no longer an experiment on paper. Applications are being filed, visas are being issued, and a small industry of relocation services, language courses and property assistance has begun to grow around it. Whether the people using it ultimately stay is a different question.

Stefanesco argues that the policy has now moved beyond the experimental stage: applications are being filed, visas issued and businesses offering relocation, language and property services are emerging around it. Whether those using the scheme ultimately remain in Russia is another question.