A MILLION. That, very roughly, is how many Russians have left their country since Vladimir Putin stepped up his war on Ukraine earlier this year. It is a staggering number, but an overlooked one. We have – understandably – focused on the even bigger exodus from Ukraine.

But Russians are running from Putin too, including a lot of men, young ones, who do not want to die – or kill – in his name. It is nearly three weeks since the Kremlin hardman – his professional army reeling from defeat on the battlefield – ordered what he called a partial mobilisation.

He said he was going to draft 300,000 men in to the military. His often creaking and widely corrupt civil service has managed to pressgang a lot of involuntary soldiers, especially, reports suggest, from poorer and ethnic minority regions. But even more have headed for the borders.

Russian authorities have not provided details on how many have left the country since mobilisation. But reporters have been trying to keep a tally of sorts, using data from neighbouring states. The Russian edition of Forbes, as an example, reckons it was around 700,000, by October 4.

And, of course, this new wave of emigres and refugees includes the hundreds of thousands – including comedians, journalists, activists and artists – who quit Russia back in February and March.

Mobilisation matters. A lot. It is having a devastating effect on Russian society. There are reports of schools running out of teachers.

Here in Scotland, a frightening number of commentators had lazily and wrongly spoken of Putin’s conscript army. Now he really is pushing non-volunteers to the front. This means ordinary Russians - who often feel there is little or nothing they can do to deter the Kremlin - can no longer put their hands over their ears and sing lah-lah-lah. Mobilisation feels like an unwritten compact between the regime and its people has been broken. A lot of Russians thought they could stay out of trouble as long as they stayed out of politics. Well, not any more.

These men have reason to be afraid. This week Russian independent news site Meduza calculated Putin’s human losses as 90,000 – men who are dead, missing, captured or too injured to go back to fighting.

And so Russia is losing some of its potentially most economically and culturally productive people. But where to? That matters too. And also a lot.

In the first two weeks after mobilisation, according, again, to Forbes, something like 66,000 Russians entered the European Union. Some EU member states, after all, have decided to keep them out, ending the kind of tourist visas most escapees use to travel.

Compare this with the 200,000 Russians known to have crossed in to Kazakhstan alone. And huge populations of people fleeing Putin’s oppression or his draft are driving up rents in cities like Tbilisi, Georgia, and Yerevan, Armenia.

The Russian dictator is waging a war to – in his deranged world view – re-unite the old Russia. And in doing so he is forcing a chunk of his people to flee in to old colonies of the tsars and republics of the commissars.

Some Georgians, Kazakhs or Armenians say they feel invaded all over again. TikTok and Twitter brim with gripes about entitled Russians who expect to get served in shops or restaurants in their own language, who still feel at home in what some still call the “near abroad”, their former imperial possessions.

There are – I should add – also plenty of Russians who say they are grateful for refuge and insist the social media noise does not reflect the generosity of their hosts.

This is history in the making. The Russian emigration – and the clear military, economic and diplomatic weakness the Kremlin has demonstrated this year – is rewriting hugely important relationships between the old metropolis and the ‘rest of the former USSR’. I wish I could tell you how this process will end. I have no idea. But it sure is worth watching.

There are still those, again, in Scotland’s too often insular commentariat who talk of spheres of influence, who think Ukraine should be doomed to live under the boot of the Kremlin. Just ‘cause. Well, what of the nation-states of Central Asia or the Trans-caucasus? We – all of us, not just idiots – have a terrible habit of stripping these nations of their agency, of filing them under “former Soviet”. Well, they are so much more interesting and important than mere provinces of the former Russian empire.

Westerners need to de-colonise our thinking about the non-Russian bits of the old USSR. We need to start understanding that nations are more than capable of asserting and exercising

their independence.

Take the conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the region we usually call Nagorno-Karabakh, its Russianised name. Putin would normally be seen as the go-to peace broker and policeman. And he certainly still plays a role. But when fighting flared up again recently a new mediator emerged: France’s Emmanuel Macron.

Russia’s hard power is diminishing. But what of its soft power? Those fleeing mobilisation are still speaking Russian to waiters and shopkeepers. And often being understood. But for how much longer?

Will Putin’s war change attitudes to the language? The Kremlin often seeks to portray Russian speakers as “ours”, or rather theirs. Its propagandists - in an eerie echo of extremist British nationalist narratives about the Scots language here - often even refer to Ukrainian as bad Russian.

Russia left the USSR with soft and hard power in the rest of the old Communist state. Did some people in its former colonies resent it? Of course. But there was also some good will and a sense of a common cultural and even linguistic space. The loss of those affinities may be one of the most important long-term consequences of Putin’s insane war. And the people who will discover this first are the Russians fleeing his draft.