This is so strange, you have some imagination but also lack of it. If you were in charge of an action-movie-esque force of 170000 hackers, would you ship them all out at once, after the start of a war that's upset a lot of people and might turn them against Russians (yeah it's not the ordinary citizens' fault but some people can't see the difference) as well as after a flight ban, or would you send them out to infiltrate everywhere slowly throughout the years, and when you send the signal, your force of 170K would easily hand over the keys to all the networks you want?

Even a plan with a few people would usually leak or catch intelligence agencies' attention, if there's a conspiracy involving 170K people, it would be headline news before it'd even get moving.

It wouldn't surprise me if some of them are, but we're talking about a couple dozen at most.

Sure, but insider attacks have pre-dated 2022 so if your only defense to them is not to hire people with Russian citizenship I don't think your Org is actually taking it seriously.

170,000 is more than 1 of every 1000 Russians -- hence far more than 1 in 1000 Russian workers. And among the top-paid workers. Hard to imagine the Russian government would want that.

I don't think so, Russia has (or at least had) quite a vibrant tech scene with startups, tech agencies and all that with customers worldwide. Like in every other metropole. And of course the people are leaving, what should they do there now... Things like this make me really wonder if Putin ever went outside of the Kremlin, going for such a destructive action