“We don’t have enough quality apartments for highly educated people with high salaries and high standards,” said Aram Shahbandarian, a former Google employee in Yerevan who helps many Russians move to the city. “Yerevan is cracking.”
Vahan Kerobyan, Armenia’s economy minister, said in an interview that as a country with a strategic relationship with Russia, it did not market itself as an attempt to take companies out of Russia, but that if companies decided to relocate, it would would work to accommodate them. †
“The Armenian technology community supports their Russian friends and the government is very concerned about giving Russian companies a nice, inexpensive place to work,” he said. Mr Kerobyan estimates that 43,000 people have moved from Russia to Armenia, half of whom have Russian passports and half have Armenian passports.
Miro, an American software company, chartered flights to Yerevan for its Russian employees and moved them to two hotels in the heart of the city, Kerobyan said. X-tensive, a software development company in Russia, has also moved its employees to the Armenian city because its primary customer, ServiceTitan, has an office there, he said.
Miro has publicly said it would move its employees from Russia. X-tensive did not respond to a request for comment.
War between Russia and Ukraine: important developments
Many of those workers may eventually move to other places because visa restrictions require them to leave their current homes after a certain number of days. Many do not know where to go. Others are planning moves to emerging tech hubs further afield, such as Dubai and Lisbon.
Artem Taganov, founder and chief executive of a Russian start-up called HintEd, said he knew about 70 founders of Russian companies who, like him, had fled to Armenia. If entrepreneurs stay in Russia, he said, their businesses can only serve the local market.
