President Trump has said he trusts President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to abide by any peace deal on Ukraine they negotiate. Many Russians who fled the country in the early months of the war are not so sure.

Nor do they have much faith that the conditions that drove them abroad — including a crackdown on any political dissent — will change anytime soon, whether Mr. Trump manages to broker a cease-fire or not. For the moment, those talks appear to have stalled since Mr. Putin rebuffed a proposal by Mr. Trump and Ukraine for a 30-day truce.

“The war will be over when Putin is over,” said Pavel Snop, a real-estate agent from St. Petersburg who fled to Turkey three years ago. He added, “Putin is going to keep bargaining: But he’s bargaining not for his country and its citizens, but for sanctions relief for himself and his friends.”

For the Kremlin, the future of some 800,000 Russians who fled their country after the invasion is a sensitive political and economic subject. Their existence is a stark reminder that many Russians opposed the war, or at least did not want to fight in it.

The exodus of so many people, who tend to be highly educated and work in professional fields that are in high demand, has also been damaging for the economy, experts say.

But even if they are homesick and struggling to put down roots elsewhere, many Russians abroad do not believe that the Kremlin will stop persecuting people for their anti-government stance no matter what happens on the battlefield in Ukraine.

A survey conducted by the research project OutRush that surveyed some 8,500 Russian émigrés in more than 100 countries from July to November, before cease-fire talks began, showed that only a small share planned to move back to Russia if the war ended.

While the survey is not representative of all Russian émigrés, it showed that about 40 percent of poll respondents said they would consider returning if they saw democratic changes in Russia.

“Right now, trust in the Russian government is extremely low,” said Emil Kamalov, who is part of the OutRush team, based in Italy and in the United States, that has studied the Russian exodus.

On a recent Friday in Istanbul, émigrés from Russia, predominantly in their 30s and 40s, mingled with glasses of sparkling wine and kombucha at the opening of an exhibition at Black Mustache, a bookstore opened by a Russian exile in 2022. They shared stories of the bureaucratic complications of getting a residence permit in Turkey, of the difficulty of finding an apartment in Berlin and of hunts for work in their new countries.

But many have friends or family still in Ukraine, and say their own ordeals pale in comparison to what they have gone through: loss of life, large-scale destruction and Russian occupation.

Mikhail, 37, who said he works in entertainment, described the wrenching experience of uprooting his wife and young daughter from Moscow in March 2022, soon after the full-scale Russian invasion started. He asked that his surname not be used, fearing retribution against his wife who, unlike him, occasionally visits Russia.

Now settled in Istanbul, Mikhail says he would like to at least visit Moscow without fear of being grabbed off the street and drafted to fight in Ukraine.

After a first wave right after the invasion of Ukraine, the exodus of Russians, particularly of young men of fighting age, intensified in the fall of 2022 when Mr. Putin announced a partial mobilization.

Some went back after the Kremlin stopped issuing call-up orders for civilians, but the mobilization decree is still technically in place. That means the government can force any Russian civilians of military age into service.

“Moving back is not even on the agenda for us right now,” Mikhail said. “Russia would need to at least officially end the mobilization so that I and others feel we are no longer in danger.”

He said he saw “no concrete steps” by the Kremlin that would make him change his mind about the direction in which Mr. Putin was taking his country.

Russian officials have made no public indication that they plan to ease things on the home front.

Vyacheslav V. Volodin, speaker in the Russian Parliament, recently doubled down on threats against Russian émigrés, saying that those who left should “come and repent on Red Square.”

Other lawmakers have been drafting laws to go after Russians involved with “hostile” foreign organizations — or who have merely spoken out against the war.

Within two weeks of attending antiwar protests in St. Petersburg in 2022, and after being arrested and fined, Mr. Snop, the real-estate agent, booked a one-way ticket to Istanbul and said goodbye to his parents.

That decision proved to be prescient: Six months into the war, and after he had left, Mr. Snop was issued a summons by the military. When his father died in 2023, he could not go to the funeral, fearing arrest over the draft-dodging and his antiwar activism.

After three years of burning through his savings and grappling with the ups and downs of exile, Mr. Snop set up a business in Istanbul last summer with a local partner advising on real-estate deals for fellow Russians.

The idea of going back to his old job in his beloved city of St. Petersburg is tempting, he said, but he does not want to return to a country he sees as increasingly authoritarian.

He added that some Russians now take precautions when returning home, including purging their social media accounts, to avoid trouble with the authorities. His dream is “to be able to come to my favorite city freely, without deleting Telegram, speaking loudly and freely on the bus and at cafes.”

Konstantin Sonin, an economics professor at Chicago Harris School of Public Policy, said that the departure of so many younger people could cause profound damage to Russia’s long-term economic development.

“The brain drain is a major blow to the economy, and the young, most talented and promising ones were the first to get offers and leave,” he said.

The OutRush poll showed that 80 percent of Russian émigrés have a university degree, compared with the average in Russia of 54 percent.

Some sectors of the economy were hit particularly hard, like information technology and higher education, Professor Sonin said.

In some host countries, the influx of well-educated Russians with high purchasing power has helped spur an economic boom: In Armenia, the economy in 2022 grew by 14 percent, with economists partly crediting the Russian émigrés.

Clearly disturbed by the flight of thousands of young I.T. professionals, some Russian officials in the initial months of the full-scale invasion tried luring them back with preferential mortgage rates and deferrals from military service.

But the Kremlin has since largely given up such efforts.

Oleg Chernousov is among those who said he was unlikely to return anytime soon.

He arrived in Istanbul in March 2022 with no Turkish and few savings, before setting up the Black Mustache store, where he hosted the recent exhibition by an artist friend from St. Petersburg alongside a large selection of English-language books.

Mr. Chernousov said that, whatever the outcome of cease-fire talks, the main concern of the émigrés he knows was the erosion of freedoms in Russia. And he does not think closer relations between Washington and Moscow will reverse that.

“I don’t think Trump cares about what is happening inside Russia — democratic change in Russia definitely does not depend on that,” he said.