A family who are among the rising tide of Westeners seeking citizenship in Vladimir Putin‘s Russia say they felt “persecuted” at home. The Hares, devout Christians with three sons aged 12, 15 and 17, moved from the US to Russia two years ago amid “a great upsurge in LGBT-type policies” on home soil. They claim to feel “safer” under Putin’s authoritarian dictatorship, in part because of its ban on so-called “LGBT propaganda” and have echoed the Russian leader in their condemnation of the US’s “demonic attack against conservative Christian families”.

“There are laws that say: ‘No you can’t just run wild and have gay pride parades and dance in front of all the children,'” Leo Hare told Sky News. “You can’t do this. I like this.” The self-declared “moral migrants” aren’t alone in escaping the “woke” West for Putin’s oppression. New figures from Russia’s interior ministry show that 2,275 people have applied for the country’s new shared values visa, aimed at attracting likeminded citizens from the US, Britain and the EU on an initial three-year basis.

Philip Hutchinson, whose firm Moscow Connects, reportedly receives between 50 and 80 inquiries a week from prospective UK citizens, said the trend was also being driven by economic frustration.

“There’s a huge amount of people that are frustrated by the way the country’s got in,” he said. “Taxes keep going up and up and up. And we’re giving all this money to Ukraine.”

Putin’s introduction of the visa scheme last August followed years of positioning himself as the antithesis to Western democracies, presenting a front of Russian sovereignty and traditional values in contrast to his “satanic” counterparts around the globe.

While Russia’s economy has measurably suffered since the Ukraine invasion in 2022, with soaring interest rates and inflation buoyed by tariff hikes, Putin has also further curtailed citizen freedoms in recent years under the guidance of the country’s militant orthodox church.

Dissenters have been handed long jail sentences for offences including posting an LGBT flag online.

A report by the United Nations last year also found an acceleration in human rights abuses, especially linked to those circulating so-called fake news and individuals or organisations suspected of receiving foreign support.

New laws brought in since the invasion have led to “mass arbitrary arrests”, it said, including that of Artyom Kamardin, who was jailed for seven years in 2023 for reading an anti-war poem in public on charges of “inciting hatred”.

Westerners fleeing the perceived tide of “wokeness” in the UK, US and most of the EU don’t appear worried about Russia’s tightening civil liberties, however. “I love Russia,” Philip Port, from Burnley, Lancashire, said. “There’s no crime, the streets are clean, it’s well-developed.”

Asked whether the war bothers him, Mr Hutchinson said, without hestiation: “It doesn’t. As far as I’m concerned, I’m not getting involved with that. You know, I’m not here to deal with politics.”