On Monday evening, Nikita, a 24-year-old from the Russian city of Voronezh, drove up to a border crossing on the arid steppeland along Russia’s remote border with Kazakhstan. Around 500 cars were already in line at the isolated checkpoint.
A Russian army reservist liable to be called up under the partial mobilisation President Vladimir Putin announced last week, Nikita had decided to flee to the relative safety of Atyrau, an oil boom town in western Kazakhstan, where his brother and a close friend had already arrived.
