Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. It's an honour to be able to address the committee.
I would like to focus my remarks on two distinct groups of global and transnational networks that the war has spotlighted and that I believe reverberate back into western societies, Canada included. They also pose some significant policy challenges.
The first you will have certainly heard of and deliberated about, and that is the group of oligarchs. We have seen Russian oligarchs targeted with sanctions by the U.K., Canada, the EU and the U.S. Here, we have acknowledged in some ways that a bet that we made a long time ago has failed, and that is the idea that if oligarchs had access to western stock markets and boardrooms and philanthropic types of circles, then their behaviour would be moderated and somehow they could influence the Kremlin itself into moderation.
We face two challenges with the oligarchs going forward. One is going after their assets and freezing them, and the other one is their reputations. In both of these areas, we also have to contend with service professionals who work here in the west, in the U.K., in the U.S. and in Canada, who enable both of these processes. They take their money, put them into luxury real estate, purchase shell companies and hide them in complex networks of bank accounts, as well as the PR agencies and the reputation management firms and lobbyists who try to recast them, not as politically exposed persons with links to the Kremlin but rather as global philanthropists. This is a challenge across all western societies.
The second group perhaps is less on your radar, so I will focus a little more time on them. That is this emerging community of new Russian exiles that we see the war has created. Certainly, we have seen a steady stream of opposition and journalists go out of Russia during Vladimir Putin's increasingly authoritarian reign, but the dislocations of the last month are truly striking. I would focus on three distinct groups here.
First, hundreds of journalists are fleeing Russia. They are setting up their own networks and channels. We already have a number of distinct Russian independent media outlets that operate from abroad, from the Baltic states or via Telegram channels. I believe they should be supported and openly encouraged because they're the only source of Russian-language independent media out there.
Second, tens of thousands of IT workers, with 50 to 70 this month, possibly up to another 70 next month, have fled the country. They are in places like Georgia, Armenia or Uzbekistan. As the Russian government has sanctioned big tech and declared Facebook undesirable, you have seen a flight of qualified IT workers outside of the country too.
The third group would be hundreds of academics and think tank analysts who have also left the country, who do not want to face the consequences of 15 years in prison for calling out this war. They're also exiled in places like eastern Europe and Istanbul, and they are also looking for new types of affiliations and academic homes.
My suggestion to the committee here is to think about strategies to enhance and strengthen these new networks of exiles as they try to promote independent thought and affect, as much as they can from outside, the disinformation propaganda within the country, and to think about what kinds of policies can be adopted to sort of make us a force multiplier as the Kremlin tries to decouple from the west, to ensure that these independent and critical voices can be encouraged from outside of the country.