Why do foreigners still move to Russia in 2026?

The short answer

Foreigners still move to Russia for four very different reasons: studies, love, work, and ideology. The proportions have shifted since 2022, but the total number of foreigners inside the country — students especially — has kept growing.

By the end of the 2024/2025 academic year, 414,600 international students from 182 countries were studying at Russian universities, according to the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education — nearly 32,000 more than in 2022 (TASS). The top five sending countries are China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and India (Russia–IslWorld / Ministry data).

Beyond students, three other groups keep arriving in smaller numbers:

• Partners of Russian citizens who moved for family reasons.
• Foreign professionals working for companies that stayed after 2022 or opened new offices — mostly from China, India, Turkey and the UAE.
• A politically motivated minority who apply through Russia's Shared Values visa, introduced in 2024. Russia says nearly 3,400 people had applied under this scheme as of spring 2026 (BBC).

None of these groups look like each other. The Chinese engineering student in Kazan has nothing in common with the American evangelical family in Ivanovo, and the British software developer in Moscow has nothing in common with either. This post is about all four.

1. The largest group by far: students

The scale is the surprise. Russia now ranks seventh in the world by number of international students, hosting about 8.5% of its total student body from abroad (RT, citing Vedomosti).

The growth has three real drivers:

Chinese students. Their number in Russia rose from around 30,000 in 2020 to over 50,000 in the 2024/2025 academic year — a 72% increase, according to the Warsaw-based Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW). China is now the third-largest country of origin overall and by far the leading source for master's students — its 16,411 master's students accounted for about 36% of all master's students in Russia in 2024.

Central Asian students. Kazakhstan alone sends about 60,000 students; Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan together another 40,000+. Shared history, Russian-language schooling at home, cheap tuition and geographical proximity make Russia the default choice for a first degree.

Students from India, Egypt and Iran. Between 2019 and 2024, the number of students from these countries roughly doubled, according to the Russian International Affairs Council. The main attraction is medical school — a Russian MD costs a fraction of a private degree in India or Iran and is recognised in most of the world outside Europe.

If you meet a foreigner in a Russian university corridor today, they are most likely Chinese, Kazakh, Uzbek, Indian or Egyptian — not Western.

2. Love and family

The oldest reason to move anywhere. Foreign partners of Russian citizens have quietly moved to Moscow, St Petersburg and provincial cities for decades. Their stories rarely reach headlines, but they're the second-largest identifiable group of Western foreigners inside Russia.

British expat Stephen Matthews moved to Moscow in 2005 after a long-distance relationship with his Russian wife, then settled into a job at an international law firm and had two children (Expat Arrivals).

British writer Michele Berdy — the long-time Moscow Times language columnist — first moved to the USSR in 1978 as a student, married a Russian bass player in 1981, and returned to make her career in Moscow after brief experiments back in New York (Russian Life).

A British man interviewed by the BBC and identified only as Ben moved from Derby to Kursk in 2023 after "falling in love with a Russian woman he met through a language exchange website." He explicitly rejects the idea that Russia is "some kind of conservative paradise": "Russia isn't some utopia," he said (BBC).

The story is always personal. It is almost never political.

3. Work

Foreign professionals in Russia today fall into two very different categories.

The first: people whose companies stayed. Many Western firms officially left after 2022, but their Russian subsidiaries were often bought by local management, and some foreign specialists stayed on personal contracts.

The second, much larger group: professionals from countries whose economic ties with Russia grew after 2022 — China, India, Turkey, the UAE, Belarus and Iran. Bilateral trade with China alone reached over $240 billion in 2024, and Chinese managers, engineers and traders now form a visible community in Moscow.

Salaries for foreign specialists in Moscow remain internationally competitive by regional standards, especially in IT, oil and gas, logistics and finance. Living costs in Moscow are still lower than in most European capitals — a factor almost everyone who moves eventually mentions.

4. The ideological minority — small in scale, loud in coverage

This is the group Western media writes about most, and the group most Russians have never actually met.

Russia's Shared Values visa, introduced by presidential decree in 2024 and sometimes called the "anti-woke visa," offers temporary residency for up to three years to citizens of 47 countries Russia officially classifies as "unfriendly" (BBC). Applicants don't need to pass the usual Russian language, history or law tests — they simply declare that they share Russia's "traditional spiritual and moral values" and reject what the government calls the "destructive neoliberal ideology" of their home countries. The administrative fee is 1,600 roubles, roughly £17 or $22.

Roughly 3,400 people had applied as of spring 2026. The figure is difficult to verify independently and doesn't show how many were approved.

The best-known case in the BBC's reporting is Leo Hare, an American from Texas who moved to the Ivanovo region in late 2023 with his wife and three children. Hare told the BBC he was "convinced he was building a better future for his family" — a family life built, in his view, on "Christian faith and family values" rather than what he saw as American political division and cultural decline.

His experience since has been mixed. Within weeks of arrival, his family says they were defrauded of 5 million roubles (about £52,000 / $66,000). His older children returned to the United States. Hare himself described the previous two years as "the best and worst of my life."

British former Conservative Party candidate Philip Hutchinson now lives in Moscow and helps others use the Shared Values visa. He avoids discussing the war and told the BBC: "I'm here to live a nice quiet life with my family. We guide a lot of people towards the Shared Values visa because it's the easiest way to become a full resident here right now."

The visa is real, the applicants are real, and their motivations range from religious conviction to disillusionment with life at home. But at 3,400 applications in almost two years, this is a symbolic programme, not a mass migration.

What the numbers actually show

If you strip out the noise from both directions — the Russian state media framing of a "great migration to Russia" and the Western media framing of an isolated country nobody wants to visit — the real picture is more mundane:

• Students dominate. Roughly 414,000 international students, mostly from China, Central Asia, India and the Middle East. This number is growing every year.
• The Western presence has shrunk. Only about 2,317 students from EU countries were enrolled in Russian universities as of October 2024 — 0.5% of the total foreign student body (TASS). That's a fraction of pre-2022 numbers.
• Family migration continues at the same slow pace it always did.
• The Shared Values programme is a real but small phenomenon. Interesting to report on, easy to overstate.

Russia in 2026 is not a country that most Westerners are moving to. It is a country that a specific mix of students, spouses, professionals and a small ideological cohort keep quietly arriving in, for reasons that often have nothing to do with each other.

What we're doing next

Two Nations is building a series of first-person profiles of foreigners living in Russia today — Chinese engineering students in Kazan, Indian medical students in Kursk, Turkish traders in Moscow, and Western partners of Russians in mid-sized cities the international press never mentions.

If you live in Russia as a foreigner and want to be interviewed, reach out. If you know someone we should feature, tell us who.