Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
That's just nonsense. How can the political situation affect ordinary people? I mean in such a way that people would be scared. (I'm not sure that the last sentence is correct)
You probably familiar with border officers which check you international passport on a way out of country (this doesn't exist in North America but widely practiced in Europe and Russia is not an exclusion). It is up to them to let you out of country if you are citizen of the country. In Russia those officers can check quite a lot of information about a person, even their tax returns and have power not to let person out by any reason
You can guess what scares people not to go back to Russia