Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has signed a government decree on the procedure of military service postponement for IT specialists. A statement to this effect has been published on the government website.
Under the new rules, men under 27 years of age with higher education and at least one year of experience in the IT-sphere will be able to have their service deferred. The postponement decree also applies to specialists with less than one year of experience, but on condition they graduated from a university a year before getting their job in IT.
The list of professions and areas of expertise which make a person eligible for postponement, includes over 60 items, such as mathematics, applied computer science, cartography and geoinformatics, radio engineering, electronics and nanoelectronics, robotics, aircraft engineering, shipbuilding, etc.
Companies that want to get a postponement for their employees must compile a list and send it to the Ministry of Science and Technology by May 1, 2022.
The Russian Association for Electronic Communications (RAEC) estimates that nearly 70,000 IT specialists left Russia in February and March 2022 in a wave of mass emigration that began after Russia invaded Ukraine, and that number will only grow in the future. The organization predicts that another 70,000-100,000 IT specialists will leave the country in April.