Thousands of Russians have fled their country since Vladimir Putin’s forces invaded Ukraine.

Large numbers opposing the war have gone to Turkey, as well as Georgia, Kyrgyzstan and Finland.

This week the Kremlin confirmed that its first senior government official, Anatoly Chubais, had left Russia.

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“Chubais has resigned voluntarily. And it is up to him whether to leave or not,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov told the Interfax news agency.

President Putin has described the people leaving as “scum and traitors” and said Russian society will “spit them out like a gnat”.

But Mr Chubais isn’t the only high-profile Russian to leave. Sky News takes a look at some of the others too.

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Anatoly Chubais

Anatoly Chubais has held several government roles, most notably under Vladimir Putin’s predecessor.

The 66-year-old veteran reformer once served as former president Boris Yeltsin’s chief of staff.

A former economist, he is best known for spearheading Russia’s controversial privatisation scheme during the 1990s, which created the country’s market economy and facilitated the rise of the Russian oligarchs.

He recommended Mr Putin for his first job at the Kremlin before he became leader in 2000, and has had several roles under his administration, despite his liberal views and leanings towards the West.

Mr Chubais was head of the state-run technology firm Rusnano and was appointed the Kremlin’s climate envoy in 2020.

Although he no longer held great power, he is a well-known name throughout Russia, making his departure significant.

After the invasion began, he posted images of the late Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov and liberal economist Yegor Gaidar. Both had warned of the dangers of letting Mr Putin amass too much power before they died.

Chubais wrote of Gaidar: “In our arguments about Russia’s future I didn’t always agree with him. But it appears that Gaidar understood strategic risk better than I, and that I was wrong.”

Although the Kremlin fell short of confirming he had left the country, the Russian newspaper Kommersant published pictures of him withdrawing money from an ATM in Istanbul.

Arkady Dvorkovich

Arkady Dvorkovich is president of the International Chess Federation (FIDE). His father Vladimir was a global chess arbiter.

He is a close confidant of Dmitry Medvedev who has served as president and prime minister during Mr Putin’s rise to power.

Mr Dvorkovich, 49, was deputy prime minister to Mr Medvedev from 2012 to 2018.

He was chairman of the Russian state-backed science and technology foundation Skolkovo until the war began.

Following the invasion, Mr Dvorkovich criticised it in an interview with Mother Jones magazine.

He said: “Wars are the worst things one might face in life. Any war. Anywhere. Wars do not just kill priceless lives.

“Wars kill hopes and aspirations, freeze or destroy relationships and connections. Including this war.”

FIDE has since banned a top Russian chess player for his vocal support of Mr Putin and the conflict.

Mr Dvorkovich also said that FIDE was “making sure there are no official chess activities in Russia or Belarus, and that players are not allowed to represent Russia or Belarus in official or rated events until the war is over and Ukrainian players are back in chess.”

Members of the ruling United Russia party called for his involvement with the Skolkovo Foundation to end and he subsequently stepped down.

Face

Russian rapper Face, whose real name is Ivan Timofeevich Dryomin, has had several concerts cancelled by law enforcement.

His explicit lyrics, which often refer to sex and drugs, are considered provocative by the Russian state, and have seen Kremlin PR officials offer him the chance to produce pro-government content – something he declined.

Responding to being effectively censored, the 24-year-old released an album entitled Mysterious Ways in 2018, which refers to corruption and describes Russia as a “third world country”.

Earlier this year, the rapper’s aunt Kristina Nedorezova said in a now-deleted Facebook post that he had left the country.

Face later appeared to confirm he had fled, with an Instagram post that read: “I don’t plan to return to Russia, to pay taxes there.

“Our state has forced me and my loved ones to leave our house, our land.”

Lilia Gildeyeva

Lilia Gildeyeva, 45, was a well-known anchor for the state-funded Russian TV channel NTV, which has been vehemently pro-Kremlin since Putin rose to power in 2000.

She quit her job and left Russia shortly after the invasion.

Ms Gildeyeva said the channel’s news coverage is controlled by the government and bosses receive direct orders from officials.

She admitted to supporting a separatist insurgency in Ukraine following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.

Speaking of her decision to leave the country, she told The Insider this month she had to “stop all this”.

“It was an immediate nervous breakdown,” she said. “For several days I couldn’t pull myself together. The decision was probably obvious right away. There won’t be any more work.”

She added: “When you gradually give in to yourself, you don’t notice the depth of the fall. And at some point, you find yourself face to face with the picture that leads to 24 February.”

On 4 March Mr Putin’s administration passed a law threatening to imprison anyone publishing “knowingly false information” about the war in Ukraine, which includes referring to it as a war.

Zhanna Agalakova

Zhanna Agalakova worked for the state TV channel, Channel One, mainly as a foreign correspondent, based in Paris, New York and other Western countries.

The 56-year-old gave a news conference in Paris earlier this month saying she “left Channel One precisely because the war started” and she did not intend to return to Russia.

She said she expected Russian officials to claim she was a foreign agent, but denied she was working for any other state.

Ms Agalakova told French reporters: “When I spoke to my bosses, I said I cannot do this work anymore.

“We have come to a point when on TV, on the news, we’re seeing the story of only one person – or the group of people around him.

“All we see are those in power. In our news, we don’t have the country. In our news, we don’t have Russia.”

Referring specifically to the annexation of Crimea and subsequent separatist movement in the Donbas region of Ukraine, she described the channel’s reporting as “propaganda”.

In her job, Ms Agalakova said she was only allowed to “talk about the bad things happening in the US”.

“My reports didn’t contain lies, but that’s exactly how propaganda works: You take reliable facts, mix them up, and a big lie comes together. Facts are true, but their mix is propaganda,” she added.

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