>>Our unemployment is 3.8% — this is the lowest figure in the history of the Russian Federation. Further figures will be even lower.

Putin's probably right in this. Lose much of your (limited due to demographics) potential workforce to either the armed forces or to expatriation - and unemployment levels will go down. I'd note that a good portion of the first wave were people with talents that allowed them employment outside the RF, and that the USSR's actually quite good education of pretty much everyone stopped in 89-90, so the pool of educated people was much smaller than the working-age demographic. Losing those people with outside-the-RF employability was probably a larger blow than we now appreciate.

As I understand it, there's a large pool of potentially mobilized men who are 'hiding out' as they need to have a mobilization notice delivered into their hands for it to have the force of law. Once the mobilization boards realize that these men are still working, and start delivering notices at the workplace (as opposed to the current practice of delivering to the registered residential address) I expect a third exodus (either cross border or to grandma's dacha) as word of that spreads, doing further economic damage.