> We have some figures from "ministry of IT" which Masha linked

Even judging by the official numbers, 100k is a lot of professionals in a rapidly slowing down economy in the need of said professionals. Unofficial numbers range up to 1 mil total left with 500.000 of them being from tech sector. Possibly even worse than official numbers that are always a conviniently crafted lie, like it was in 2020 with covid death downscaled 2 times.

> She conveniently forgot to add that 80% of IT workers who left actually continued to work for Russia

But not participating in russian economy directly and in futurre possibly working on local tech sector projects and not russian ones. It is not a 1 year story, we are in a long haul

> some experienced IT guys left the country juniors and interns are in insane competition for jobs

That somehow disproves the point? That the tech sector lost its best heads so now they struggle to replace them with other professionals for high qualification jobs which juniors arent ready for? Besides its not just tech sector, the whole russian economy is shrinking rapidly. Even in non-technical positions there were changes with layoffs, lower pay, half-schedules and unpaid leaves [1]

> IT guys are exempted from the draft

The fact that it is even mentioned is . Yes, thats what people are running from for either reason (to not be killed, not kill or both). And tech sector is the closest to internationally viable opportunity so it had the most people leave

> Yandex censored search and news results before

True, since about 2011 as mentioned in the link but way noticeably since 2016. Yet while it was censoring results, it wasnt a blanked war time censorship on anything opposing the government. You could've searched for meduza and dozhd. Now you cant

> AI department, AI assistants

All scaled down because of the sanctions [2][3] and leaving professionals. They wont dissapear just because, but they also wont grow as much.

> Durov reached an agreement with the russian government

The agreement was that TG would stay in that gray zone indefinitely using alternative financing sources like crypto scams and later ads and subscribtion. Gray zone means nobody can censor it, neither russians, nor nato/otan. And this is preferable to russia than local-only service like vk (because of said radicals in other countries). Yes, some people will still access some anti-gvmt channels, but its a minority. Propaganda already changed the nation into 1/4 lunatics supporting the war and 2/4 "having no opinion"

> there are no compelling arguments that "Russia killed its tech industry"

That it drove away more professionals while disconnecting itself from global economy that helped prosper said tech sector in the first place? Sure, okay, mhm

> It worsenes the chances to understand each other

Guys, you dont understand, full controll over your population with military ideology and silencing any opposition is actually good. Look at all the achievements USSR has made while being same totalitarian regime. Just ignore the quality of life for majority of the time under communism, look, we have a first person in space. It costed us just most other economic sectors like computers, farming equipment, production machinery, car industry, trains industry, local municipalities growth in general and developing independent culture

[1] https://lenta.ru/news/2022/08/04/platformasravni/
[2] https://www.vedomosti.ru/technology/articles/2022/09/02/9387...
[3] https://www.rbc.ru/technology_and_media/23/06/2022/62b473de9...