Is it any 8 years, or continious 8 years? In most places, the requirement is for continious, which is a tough ask. Imagine not being able to leave the country for almost a decade.
And you need a reason to get residence permit. In most cases there are few: living with spouse, reuniting with family, working, studying, or doing business. Of those, only work, study and business are the ones that are realistically achievable.
For work, there’s usually also a requirement for employeer to prove that there are no natives available to fill the role. This is a tough process, which takes a lot of time and no guarantee it’d even get approved. So, not many employees even bother unless you have exceptional skills.
For study, you would have to actually study to avoid expulsion, while somehow earning enough on some part-time remote work to support yourself (or have enough savings to support yourself for years). And then, bachelors is not enough so you must go for PhD. Meanwhile, in both above cases you have to also learn local language. I’m sure there are people who could pull this off, but, again, it’s quite exceptional.
Last is business. Usually the requirement is to invest somewhere in the ranges of $100k to $500k into local economy. That’s not filthy rich, but, for context, for Russian it’d take 3 years of fighting on the frontlines to earn as much, with a wage considered good enough to risk dying for… And then the country can still deny you permit without any reason.
It’s because of this, most people I know, who chose to leave the country keep their passports and either settle in Armenia and Georgia with 182/365 days renewable visa-free entry, or run circles between Serbia-Montenegro or Thailand-Vietnam.
There are also interesting opportunities with digital nomad visas, but, again, the requirements out of reach for most.
But for oligarchs, this is pennies. They can buy a few outright, then fly private jet to the US as tourists with pregnant wives, get children born there, then send them to study in London. Apply for family reunifications, bam, theyre now citizens of US and UK, in addition to all previous ones.
I assume if the Russian maintainers showed that they’ve passed the citizenship examinations and their different citizenship is only a matter of time
It’s the other way around. You have to live for X years to be eligible for the test. Given a common requirement of 5 years, they would have to have started this process 2 years before the war broke out.
This idea ignores how Russia works. Everyone already knows it’s a totalitarian shithole. They just don’t have the means to fight it, so they either lay low and play along, or try to get the fuck out. Sanctions hit the second group, as well as companies that implement them because they’re losing income. In fact, older folk here still grumble at USSR collapse and how effective free reign of capitalism was in the 90s at extracting wealth out of the country.
Even if that idea was to hold any water, straight up blocks are not what you’d need. For example, when I open up a site and I see a block page, the idea that pops into my head is always the same - “what a bunch of assholes…”. I can bypass the block either way, but the difference is that it can say either “blocked by the ministry of truth”, or “blocked because ur russian, haha get rekt”. Given how easy it is to get hit by censorship for innocent things, it’s rather easy to shift the blame, while keeping the business running, by just standing up to the ideas of free speech, like not removing the “celebrating the pride month” logo in that country specifically, like all of them did…