Russia’s economy pays price of Putin’s war call-up

● The call-up of men to fight in Ukraine has left labour so scarce in Russia that entire industries are in distress.

Two months after the Kremlin announced the mobilisation, a record depletion of workers is fast spreading across a country already hobbled by an ageing and shrinking population and with unemployment near the lowest ever.

A study by the Gaidar Institute in Moscow in November found that up to a third of Russian industry may face a shortage of personnel because of the draft, the most severe crunch since 1993.

The mobilisation of 300,000 men, combined with an even bigger wave of emigration it triggered, will reduce the male labour pool by 2%.

A third of companies lost employees to the call-up, with nearly a fifth saying they have not yet been able to replace them, the survey showed.

Résumés from Russian citizens are flooding countries across much of the post-Soviet region and Turkey, with IT specialists accounting for a fifth of the total, according to HeadHunter Group, Russia’s biggest online job-search platform.

Natalia Danina, chief of HeadHunter’s analytical department, said demand for blue-collar workers is surging. The age group of 20 through 24 counts no more than 7-million people, a steep drop from over 12-million a decade ago, she said. “These are terrifying numbers,” Danina said. Migrants account for up to 10% of the labour market, with Russia growing more reliant on them for low-skill labour. Bloomberg