President Trump has said he trusts President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to abide by any peace deal on Ukraine they negotiate. Many Russians who fled the country in the early months of the war are not so sure.
Nor do they have much faith that the conditions that drove them abroad — including a crackdown on any political dissent — will change anytime soon, whether Mr. Trump manages to broker a cease-fire or not. For the moment, those talks appear to have stalled since Mr. Putin rebuffed a proposal by Mr. Trump and Ukraine for a 30-day truce.
“The war will be over when Putin is over,” said Pavel Snop, a real-estate agent from St. Petersburg who fled to Turkey three years ago. He added, “Putin is going to keep bargaining: But he’s bargaining not for his country and its citizens, but for sanctions relief for himself and his friends.”
For the Kremlin, the future of some 800,000 Russians who fled their country after the invasion is a sensitive political and economic subject. Their existence is a stark reminder that many Russians opposed the war, or at least did not want to fight in it.
The exodus of so many people, who tend to be highly educated and work in professional fields that are in high demand, has also been damaging for the economy, experts say.
But even if they are homesick and struggling to put down roots elsewhere, many Russians abroad do not believe that the Kremlin will stop persecuting people for their anti-government stance no matter what happens on the battlefield in Ukraine.
A survey conducted by the research project OutRush that surveyed some 8,500 Russian émigrés in more than 100 countries from July to November, before cease-fire talks began, showed that only a small share planned to move back to Russia if the war ended.
While the survey is not representative of all Russian émigrés, it showed that about 40 percent of poll respondents said they would consider returning if they saw democratic changes in Russia.
“Right now, trust in the Russian government is extremely low,” said Emil Kamalov, who is part of the OutRush team, based in Italy and in the United States, that has studied the Russian exodus.
On a recent Friday in Istanbul, émigrés from Russia, predominantly in their 30s and 40s, mingled with glasses of sparkling wine and kombucha at the opening of an exhibition at Black Mustache, a bookstore opened by a Russian exile in 2022. They shared stories of the bureaucratic complications of getting a residence permit in Turkey, of the difficulty of finding an apartment in Berlin and of hunts for work in their new countries.
But many have friends or family still in Ukraine, and say their own ordeals pale in comparison to what they have gone through: loss of life, large-scale destruction and Russian occupation.
Mikhail, 37, who said he works in entertainment, described the wrenching experience of uprooting his wife and young daughter from Moscow in March 2022, soon after the full-scale Russian invasion started. He asked that his surname not be used, fearing retribution against his wife who, unlike him, occasionally visits Russia.
Now settled in Istanbul, Mikhail says he would like to at least visit Moscow without fear of being grabbed off the street and drafted to fight in Ukraine.
After a first wave right after the invasion of Ukraine, the exodus of Russians, particularly of young men of fighting age, intensified in the fall of 2022 when Mr. Putin announced a partial mobilization.
Some went back after the Kremlin stopped issuing call-up orders for civilians, but the mobilization decree is still technically in place. That means the government can force any Russian civilians of military age into service.
“Moving back is not even on the agenda for us right now,” Mikhail said. “Russia would need to at least officially end the mobilization so that I and others feel we are no longer in danger.”
He said he saw “no concrete steps” by the Kremlin that would make him change his mind about the direction in which Mr. Putin was taking his country.
Russian officials have made no public indication that they plan to ease things on the home front.
Vyacheslav V. Volodin, speaker in the Russian Parliament, recently doubled down on threats against Russian émigrés, saying that those who left should “come and repent on Red Square.”
Other lawmakers have been drafting laws to go after Russians involved with “hostile” foreign organizations — or who have merely spoken out against the war.
Within two weeks of attending antiwar protests in St. Petersburg in 2022, and after being arrested and fined, Mr. Snop, the real-estate agent, booked a one-way ticket to Istanbul and said goodbye to his parents.
That decision proved to be prescient: Six months into the war, and after he had left, Mr. Snop was…
Read More: Peace in Ukraine Will Not Mean a Return Home, Russian Émigrés Say