ZIN Café, an open-air watering hole in Bali, Indonesia, is best known for its matcha lava cake, rooftop bar, and suntanned, draft-dodging Russian patrons.
“Will I fight for my country? I don’t think so,” Alexei Kliui, 38, told me. “It’s not my war. I didn’t start it.”
Plus, there’s gorgeous, sprawling Canggu Beach, which you can see from our wicker chairs; the girls wandering around in bikinis; and the lava cake, which (like the tuna poke bowl) is excellent.
On top of that, rent in this tropical paradise just 581 miles south of the equator is reasonable: fully furnished two- and three-bedroom apartments and guesthouses, often with a pool, run less than $2,000 a month.
Hence, the influx of Russians, such as Kliui, who was a pro boxer and personal trainer back in the Russian Far East and now works for a real estate company.
“I am happy in Bali, and I do not want to return to Russia,” he said.
Russians have been flocking to Bali, as they have to Turkey, Thailand, Cyprus, and Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh, in search of cheap getaways since the 1991 Soviet collapse.
But after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the lifting of the Covid quarantine restrictions just over a month later, and the October 2022 mobilization of 300,000 military-age men, the number of Russian visitors skyrocketed. While precise figures are hard to come by, an estimated 100,000 Russians decamped to Bali in the year following the outbreak of war; many more have come since then. Russians now comprise the second-largest group of outsiders on the island, just behind Australians.
Dima Larin, a tatted, 37-year-old YouTube influencer with over 2 million followers, portrayed Canggu, the epicenter of the Russian expat community, as “more expensive, noisier,” with “more traffic jams, more expensive shops and restaurants”—including Russian spots that feature blini, Russian pancakes usually eaten with caviar, herring, or jam (not at the same time).
Earlier this year, an anonymous troll changed the village’s name from Canggu to New Moscow on Google Maps before irate locals changed it back. This was in keeping with worsening relations between Russians and Indonesians, who accuse the Russians of public drunkenness and cultural insensitivity, among other things. “Whenever we get reports about a foreigner behaving badly, it’s almost always Russian,” a police officer told CNN in 2023. (Last year, a Russian man posted a photo of himself, partially nude, atop Mount Agung, a sacred place to Bali’s Hindu majority. He was deported; whether he ended up back in Russia is unclear.)
But Larin told me he’s not here for the beaches, the nightlife, or the food.
He’s here to avoid getting conscripted into the army and being sent to a Ukrainian forest—and a possible death sentence. “Guys from my village where I was born were killed—three, maybe four, maybe five,” he said.
He added: “I do not feel sorry for Russian soldiers who die on the territory of Ukraine, which they occupied.”
Many Russians in Bali are conflicted—unsure where their loyalties lie or what to believe.
Rustam, 33, who comes from the city of Kazan, 550 miles due east of Moscow, has mixed emotions about being on the island. “The first two weeks of the war, I was thinking, ‘Well, it’s my country. I don’t want to go anywhere,’ ” Rustam, who declined to share his last name, told me.
But then things got harder—the sanctions, the economy. So he took off for Bali. He thought he’d stay for just two months. “It appears to be my new home,” said Rustam, who added that he gave up a well-paying tech job at a university in Sochi, on the Black Sea, to come here.
His family isn’t happy about it. When I asked him if they support the war in Ukraine, he nodded. Especially the older folks, he said.
Kliui said the same thing—that older Russians are much likelier to support Russian president Vladimir Putin.
“My parents told me that Russia didn’t start the war—it was Ukraine,” he said. “I told them, ‘It’s not true’ ”—but it didn’t matter. A January 2024 poll of Russians conducted by University of Chicago researchers found that 73 percent of those over 60 support Putin versus 53 percent of those under 30.
One thing the Russians have been unable to escape on Bali: Ukrainians, who are also hoping to ride out the war halfway around the globe.
Vladimir, 20, moved from Odesa—which is in southern Ukraine on the Black Sea and has been pummeled by Russian drones—with his girlfriend, Romona, about a year ago.
He called the Russians they had met on Bali “normal people” who understand “the real situation”—meaning they can see through the propaganda on television. It was unclear how the couple had made their way to Bali. It is illegal under Ukraine’s martial law for men ages 18 to 60 to leave the country and, in fact, at least 30 have died trying to flee.
For now, the young, seemingly happy Ukrainians, like their Russian peers, find themselves stuck in paradise—unable to go home, where they would almost certainly be arrested, sent to prison, and reviled as traitors, and unable to forget about home.
“I have some friends, soldiers in the area, and some of them die, and some of them was injured,” Vladimir told me in broken English. He said it was time for the government in Kyiv to face the fact that the war will only end when Ukraine cedes some territory to Russia—a position most Ukrainians find unpalatable, but one not that dissimilar to president-elect Donald Trump’s.
“It’s the best way,” he added. “But Ukrainian people don’t want to make it, so a lot of people will die.”
Brandon Caro is the author of the novel Old Silk Road. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Daily News, and The Daily Beast, among other publications. He resides in Austin, Texas.
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