Among the various challenges that Russia has faced since its ill-conceived full-scale invasion of Ukraine, one of the most acute has been a severe labor shortage. Russia’s deepening demographic crisis, combined with mass emigration and recruitment of hundreds of thousands of men into the army, has sharply exacerbated the problem. Meanwhile, automation and digitalization—which could partially offset the labor shortage—have advanced too slowly. In recent years, unemployment has remained at a record low of a little more than 2 percent, while estimates of the labor shortage (described by Bank of Russia chair Elvira Nabiullina as unprecedented in Russia’s modern history) have ranged from 1.5 million to 2.5 million workers.
By 2030, Russia will need to bring 10.9 million people into the workforce, according to Labor Minister Anton Kotyakov, with more than 90 percent replacing retiring workers and roughly 800,000 filling newly created positions.
The rapid expansion of defense production has drawn workers away from civilian sectors, intensifying competition for an already scarce workforce. Even in 2024, Russia’s military-industrial complex faced a shortfall of 400,000-500,000 workers, including more than 100,000 engineers and other highly skilled specialists. Russia’s civilian drone sector alone faces a shortage of 14,500 specialists, mostly drone operators, with demand projected to rise more than twentyfold to 300,000 specialists over the next decade.
Military recruitment has also lagged: According to the Conflict Intelligence Team, an independent Russian investigative group, the Defense Ministry trained a little more than 8,000 drone specialists in the first half of 2026, roughly a quarter of its 34,400 target for the period despite efforts to recruit students, graduates of military-patriotic training organizations such as DOSAAF, former aviation personnel, and qualified women.
The Kremlin’s response has rested on three pillars: mobilizing underutilized domestic labor, expanding prison labor, and increasing labor migration. Each proves to be either insufficient or self-defeating. When it comes to Russia’s labor shortage, the cure is worse than the disease.
The Kremlin haslowered barriers to youth employment and sought to accelerate students’ entry into the workforce, in some cases even before they finish high school, by reducing tuition-based university places and supporting proposals to ease restrictions on youth employment. These include a proposal to lower the minimum working age from 14 to 12—a move that could conflict with Article 32 of the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. (It’s unclear how many Russians would actually support this rather radical measure.) Many defense companies have also established training programs in partnership with universities and technical colleges. Furthermore, Russia is reducing the list of professions that are legally closed to women because they are deemed too physically demanding or hazardous; the list has already been cut by more than fourfold in recent years. That said, Russia’s high labor force participation among women—a Soviet legacy—means that there is less untapped female labor in reserve compared to many other historical wartime economies.
Although these measures may alleviate near-term shortages, they do little to expand Russia’s shrinking labor force. They also risk further eroding long-term human capital by prioritizing immediate labor needs over education and skills development, and they serve to divert workers from civilian industries in an economy that is already on the verge of stagnation. At the same time, competition between civilian industries and the military over domestic IT workers has reached an apogee, recognized at the highest levels of power, and it is ostensibly without a short-term solution.
Another option, expanding prison labor in a revival of long-standing Soviet practice, also faces constraints. Prior to 2022, prisoners primarily worked inside penal facilities (doing, for instance, sewing, woodworking, and metalwork) and were only periodically recruited by private and public companies. In the post-2022 period, however, inmates have been recruited in large numbers to fight in Ukraine, contributing to a sharp decline in the prison population.
By this May, the head of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) reported that Russia’s prison population had declined by roughly 40 percent in less than five years, from 465,000 inmates at the end of 2021 to 282,000. FSIN itself also faces acute staffing shortages, with more than 30 percent of positions vacant and shortages of junior command personnel approaching 40 percent to 50 percent in some regions. The situation has forced regional authorities to shut down dozens of underused or empty prisons in recent years. Prison labor therefore offers little remaining capacity to alleviate Russia’s broader workforce shortage.
Finally, to ease labor shortages, Russia has also increasingly sought to attract foreign workers, launching new programs, such as the “Time to live in Russia” campaign, aimed at simplifying the relocation of qualified foreign professionals. The Kremlin has also attracted workers from a broader range of friendly countries beyond Central Asia (Russia’s traditional main source of foreign labor), including India, North Korea, China, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, often reviving labor ties with countries that maintained close relations with the Soviet Union. Russia has also tried to draw on the occupied territories in Ukraine as a source of additional labor.
In some cases, recruitment has targeted specific demographic groups, such as African women who have been employed at the Alabuga drone manufacturing facility, likely because the Russian government viewed them as more controllable than men. However, recruiting such workers from more distant countries requires costly centralized recruitment and administrative infrastructure, making such labor a supplement rather than a substitute for migrants from Central Asia. Besides, today’s Russia has very limited historical experience integrating large numbers of migrants from outside the former Soviet and Russian imperial space.
In practice, too, this strategy has also faced significant constraints: As Russia has become more dependent on foreign labor, its political environment has grown steadily less welcoming to migrants. Most notably, the March 2024 terrorist attack on Crocus City Hall fueled a surge in anti-immigration sentiment in a country already historically cautious about immigration.
Calls for deportations and mass arrests have become commonplace. Despite occasional neutral or positive coverage, a report published by defense technology firm OpenMinds found that 84 percent of migrant-related media reporting between 2021 and early 2025 has carried a negative tone. Anti-migrant sentiment has also proliferated online, with the number of negative comments about migrants on popular social media website VKontakte increasing more than sevenfold between 2022 and 2024.
The July announcement that more than 800,000 Tajiks had acquired Russian citizenship over the previous decade further intensified calls among Russian politicians, influencers, and public commentators for stricter citizenship and immigration policies.
Anti-immigrant sentiment is further fueled by Russian military correspondents and pro-war bloggers who frequently highlight incidents or problems involving migrants to portray immigration as evidence of domestic disorder and potential instability while Russians are fighting and dying at the front. The eventual return of large numbers of veterans from the war (estimates put this number at potentially more than 700,000 soldiers) could further intensify ethnic tensions as frustrations over difficult reintegration and untreated PTSD are redirected toward migrants and ethnic minorities.
Unlike after World War II, when Soviet society was organized under fundamentally different political and social conditions, modern Russia has little experience reintegrating such a large veteran population. Even the veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars were far fewer in number than those serving in Ukraine. President Vladimir Putin’s September 2025 endorsement of proposals to involve Ukraine war veterans in the “fight against illegal migration” raises the prospect of deploying large numbers of former combatants without adequate medical and psychiatric support, potentially creating significant social risks.
The surge in anti-immigration sentiment in Russia has prompted new restrictions on migration and progressively stricter legislation, including the creation of a “controlled persons” register to facilitate deportations, fines for Russian citizens who assist undocumented migrants, restrictions on migrants’ ability to bring their families into the country, and restrictions on school enrollment for migrant children who do not speak Russian.
In June, the State Duma—the lower house of the Russian parliament—received a draft law intended to close a loophole that allows employers to circumvent regional restrictions on hiring foreign workers. Regional governments have increasingly exercised these powers (restrictions expanded from 15 regions in 2023 to 51 by the end of 2025), but the proposed amendment would extend them to roughly 1 million foreign workers who are citizens of the Eurasian Economic Union—a Russia-led regional economic bloc comprising several post-Soviet states. These citizens currently are not required to obtain Russian work patents (the authorization required for most other legal foreign workers), but the proposed amendment would bring nearly all legal foreign workers within their scope.
The proposal reflects a broader tightening of migration policy: For example, in August 2025, St. Petersburg banned migrants from working as couriers, ostensibly to preserve such jobs for Russian youth and students, despite persistent labor shortages in the sector. Combined with Russia’s deteriorating economic conditions and the growing attractiveness of alternative destinations for migrant workers who normally would select to work in Russia—alternatives including the European Union, Western Balkans, United Kingdom, and Gulf States—these policies have contributed to a slowdown in migration, primarily from Central Asia.
As a result, between January 2025 and January 2026, the number of foreign nationals residing in Russia fell by 10 percent. The actual migrant numbers on construction sites fell 15 percent to 20 percent in the first quarter of 2025 amid slower growth and tighter enforcement policy.
Altogether, while Russia’s labor crisis is becoming a structural constraint on the Kremlin’s wartime economy, domestic stability, and long-term geopolitical ambitions, its responses tend to exacerbate rather than resolve the problem.
Policies such as drawing students into the workforce earlier, expanding the role of women, and attempting to revive prison labor do little to expand Russia’s shrinking labor reserve. Instead, they redistribute already scarce labor. Meanwhile, efforts to rely more heavily on foreign workers increasingly collide with rising nationalist sentiment and restrictive migration policies.
Ultimately, the Kremlin faces a dilemma with no easy solution: The labor shortage stems from long-term demographic decline, but the policies available to address it either fail to expand the labor force or generate social costs that undermine their intended effect.