On getting out of Russia physically, we got my sister-in-law to Istanbul on monday. My wife had her withdraw all her money from the bank when the invasion started, before things really started locking down. We were a bit worried about her flight, but fortunately Turkey hadn't closed their airspace. Now we wait for her to get a vaccine that the US recognizes (Sputnik apparently is not acceptable for traveling to the US) and then we get her over to us. Covid had thrown a monkey wrench into her coming and staying with us sooner.
As far as what is happening in country, the media over in Russia is pure propaganda. Think the worst of Fox News like Tucker Carlson but presented as it's the nightly news broadcast and not a talking head. My MIL was very misled for the first couple of days of the war until my wife and her sister got her to stop watching the broadcast news. People who get their news from YouTubers are far better informed, but that's a tiny audience compared to how many get their news from the state media, and frankly I expect my wife's favorite streamers to be arrested very soon because telling people the truth about the invasion from inside Russia seems like a fast trip to a gulag.
We're hoping they'll get out of the country before they get arrested, but we will see.
On the refugee front, my SIL has a visa good for another year to visit the US, and we will see if she can convert to a refugee since my wife has supported Navalny with donations, and supposedly reprisals against family members have bene threatened. My wife's expectation is that Russia is on the fast track to being like North Korea because Putin retaining power requires keeping the populace cut off, in the dark, and feeling collective guilt and responsibility for the country's military actions. There's a reason he held the press conferences he did where he had all of the high ranking officials weigh in on the need to invade Ukraine, and the media is now pushing the narrative of responsibility to the populace, along with the story that the rest of the world is unjustly attacking them for trying to protect the people that were being ethnically cleansed from Ukraine (this is NOT true and not what was happening, but it IS part of how things are being spun to the Russian people).
Now we are trying to get her mom to Istanbul to at least get the vaccination taken care of. She owns property in Russia and has her pension from a state owned company (she was a power plant engineer, built and ran large power plants for her career), so we are hoping she won't have to flee the country, but we need to get the pieces in place in case she does too.
It's been a horrifying week and my wife is in pieces a lot of the time now.