“We don’t have ample high-quality flats for really educated people with superior salaries and superior requirements,” mentioned Aram Shahbandarian, a former Google staff centered in Yerevan who is aiding lots of Russians move to the city. “Yerevan is cracking.”
Vahan Kerobyan, Armenia’s overall economy minister, said in an interview that as a country with a strategic relationship with Russia, it was not marketing and advertising by itself as seeking to pull firms out of Russia, but that if corporations resolved to shift, it would work to accommodate them.
“The Armenian tech neighborhood is furnishing guidance to their Russian friends, and the governing administration is extremely a great deal apprehensive about offering Russian providers a great spot that is not much too highly-priced the place they can function,” he reported. Mr. Kerobyan believed that 43,000 persons had moved from Russia to Armenia, half of whom hold Russian passports and 50 percent Armenian passports.
Miro, a U.S. application company, chartered flights to Yerevan for its Russian workforce and moved them into two inns in the heart of the city, Mr. Kerobyan said. X-tensive, a software program development firm in Russia, has also moved its personnel to the Armenian metropolis because its primary client, ServiceTitan, has an workplace there, he said.
Miro has claimed publicly that it was going its staff out of Russia. X-tensive did not answer to a ask for for comment.
Russia-Ukraine War: Key Developments
Lots of of those staff may well at some point go on to other sites mainly because visa constraints have to have them to leave their present-day household just after a specific amount of times. Quite a few are uncertain wherever they could possibly go. Some others are scheduling moves to up-and-coming tech hubs farther absent, this kind of as Dubai and Lisbon.
Artem Taganov, founder and chief government of a Russian get started-up known as HintEd, claimed he understood about 70 founders of Russian firms who, like him, had fled to Armenia. If entrepreneurs remain in Russia, he mentioned, their providers can provide only the area industry.
