(Bloomberg) — For years, Russia has relied on Central Asian migrants to fill gaps in its workforce. As demographics and the war in Ukraine lead to the sharpest labor crisis in decades, recruiters are casting a wider net across some of the world’s most populous countries.
Russia estimates the economy will need 11 million more workers by the end of the decade.
The issue was at the fore during President Vladimir Putin’s visit to Delhi in December, when officials signed an agreement aimed at simplifying procedures for temporary labor migration.
Even before the deal, the number of work permits Russia issued to Indians jumped to more than 56,000 last year from about 5,000 in 2021. The total number of work permits granted to foreigners rose to more than 240,000 in 2025, the most since 2017, Interior Ministry statistics show. While there has been an increase in permits in the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan, much of the increase in foreign labor has come from further afield – including India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and China.
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This year, workers from India and other South Asian countries began filling communal jobs such as snow removal in major Russian cities, but foreign workers also end up working in construction, restaurants and other city services.
“We are seeing a real tectonic shift in the Russian labor market,” Elena Velyaeva, chief operating officer of Moscow-based staffing agency Intrud, said in an interview in New Delhi in December. The agency was founded just two years ago to bring foreign workers to the country, and Velyaeva is also looking for potential recruits in Sri Lanka and Myanmar, with plans to expand the search further.
While the U.S. under Donald Trump and some European countries are restricting immigration, Russia has been struggling with a demographic crisis — roughly a quarter of the population is of retirement age — since the birth rate collapsed in the 1990s. With unemployment around 2%, one of the lowest levels in the world, the economy needs new workers from abroad or risks hitting the real limits of its already slow growth.
Faced with the shortage, Russian companies are now more interested in attracting workers tied to their jobs by visas and contracts, Veljayeva said. Migrants from visa-free areas such as Central Asia are much more likely to change employers.
Intrud has partnered with the Russian Association of Welders to set up a welder training center in Chennai, southern India, where candidates are trained and assessed before being accepted to Russia, Velyaeva said.
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Other agencies organized crash courses in Russian for future hotel workers and other positions where knowledge of the language is required. In some jobs, such as construction, workers typically communicate with managers who speak both their native language and Russian, according to a recruiter in the Dubai office who spoke on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.
“Russia is the latest addition to the list of countries employing Indians,” said Amit Saxena, director of Mumbai-based Ambe International. “It’s short on manpower right now. So it’s a natural match.”
Ambe International started recruiting Indian workers for Russia only three months ago, only for the Moscow region. Now he is also involved in the recruitment of employees in the Russian Far East – in Vladivostok and Sakhalin Island.
Putin’s war against Ukraine has exacerbated an already severe labor shortage. In addition to those recruited for actual fighting, the war economy drained workers from the civilian sectors into the military industry, while an estimated 500,000 to 800,000 Russians of working age left the country in opposition to the war, to avoid mobilization or for other reasons.
Russia also tightened regulations on visa-free migration following the attack on concertgoers at the Crocus City Hall in a suburb of Moscow in 2024. At the start of the year, the number of foreign nationals in Russia fell to 5.7 million, down 10% from a year ago, although many of them are children, Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported.
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Businesses are feeling the pain.
MMC Norilsk Nickel PJSC, Russia’s largest mining company known to offer some of the highest wages in the country, had a shortage of about 10,000 workers in Siberia a year ago, the equivalent of about 10% of its entire workforce. According to a person familiar with the situation, miners in the area are still missing several thousand workers.
“The lack of qualified personnel remains one of the main challenges for Russian industry as a whole,” a company spokesman said by email.
JSC Shipbuilding Corporation Ak Bars, which builds both civilian and military vessels, has a meager 1,500-2,000 people, which is one reason it is operating at about half capacity, CEO Renat Mistakhov said.
Hiring from Asia is often cheaper for employers as well. A qualified Indian electrician can earn 25% less than what Russian recruiters are offering for similar positions, job postings on Russian and Gulf platforms suggest.
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Russia is also looking to use deepening relations with North Korea to help close the gap. Arrivals from the country to Russia are on the rise from 2022 after falling in 2017 amid a UN ban on employing the country’s citizens abroad.
Many come on student visas — about 9,000 of them in 2024, the latest year for which data is available, according to the State Department. The number of North Korean workers on Russian construction alone should have reached a total of about 50,000 by the end of 2025, the development group Eskadra estimated according to RIA Novosti.
The role of Chinese labor is completely different. Most Chinese citizens who receive work visas are employed in their own factories or companies, said Alexei Maslov, director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Lomonosov Moscow State University. It mainly operates in small and medium-sized businesses such as restaurants, logistics and wholesale, he said.
For Russia, there are no signs that the situation will change soon.
“The Russian population will continue to age and the share of young people and children will continue to decline overall,” said independent demographer Igor Efremov. “This is not a temporary crisis in the labor market, but a long-term norm that will last for decades and to which the economy will have to adapt.”
— With assistance from Greg Sullivan.
Key things
- Russia’s labor crisis is caused by an aging population and the impact of war.
- There is growing recruitment from countries like India and Sri Lanka to fill the workforce gaps.
- The shift in labor resources reflects broader geopolitical and economic trends.
Disclaimer: This story was published from the agency’s news feed without editing the text.
