The Forbes-listed billionaire paid 250 doctors and their families the missing amount for a charter from Russia days after the “partial” mobilization was announced on September 27, 2022. This is stated in the investigation of the project of the publication "Current Time" – "System", the information was confirmed by four sources.
The doctors themselves donated 40,000 rubles each to the “medical plane”, the rest was paid by an unnamed billionaire who invests in digital technologies. The flight was organized by a “famous doctor”, and in order for the charter to be released abroad, a legend about the congress in Yerevan was invented for doctors and even invitations, notebooks and pens with the logo of a fake event were distributed. The day before departure, the overloaded Yerevan airport stopped accepting charters, then the organizers flew to Kazakhstan and urgently reprinted the invitations.
The publication found that among the 250 physicians was one of the most famous Moscow oncologists, Mikhail Laskov. Laskov himself said that he was not going to emigrate, but at the end of September he needed to urgently go to Bratislava, and due to the “partial” mobilization, the airports were overcrowded. He claims that this is why he used the “medical plane”, paying 40 thousand rubles for the charter. The doctor later returned to the Russian Federation, so it is difficult to say whether he will emigrate or stay to work in Moscow. Three other passengers of the “medical plane” said that they were really scared by the mobilization, they thought that on September 28 the borders for military personnel would be closed.
The passengers themselves compared the "medical plane" with the "philosophical steamer". However, the publication notes that 250 doctors flew on this plane, which is 0.1% of the 260,000 officially registered medical workers in Russia. Sistema journalists emphasized that thousands of doctors have emigrated since the beginning of the war, but this does not exceed 2% of doctors in the Russian Federation. Sistema did not find mass ads for doctors and other signs of a shortage of personnel on the sites for the search for specialists and on the sites of large Russian clinics.