Russia turns to India in search of labor amid a crisis exacerbated by war

A group of exhausted Indians carrying sports bags lined up at the passport control checkpoint at the crowded Moscow airport, one recent evening, after traveling more than 4,300 kilometers through Uzbekistan, to obtain a job opportunity.

In light of what the Russian authorities describe as a severe shortage in the labor market amounting to at least 2.3 million workers, a shortage exacerbated by the pressures of the war in Ukraine, and the inability of traditional sources of foreign labor from the Central Asian population to fill it, Moscow is turning to a new source, which is India.

In 2021, a year before Moscow sent its forces to Ukraine, the authorities approved only about 5,000 work permits for Indians.

Last year, the authorities issued about 72,000 permits to Indian workers, about a third of the total annual quota allocated to migrant workers with visas.

The director of one of the companies that recruits Indian workers, Alexei Filippenkov, said: “Expatriate employees from India are currently the most popular,” and added that workers coming from Central Asia – which was part of the former Soviet Union, and who do not need visas to enter Russia – have stopped coming in sufficient numbers.

Despite this, official figures show that they still constitute the majority of the approximately 2.3 million foreign workers who work legally, and do not require a visa, during the past year.