Salaries At Russian Defense Companies Have Fallen For The First Time Since The Start Of The War
- 22.09.2025, 17:57
- 4,816
The Kremlin is running out of money.
By August 2025, salaries at Russian defense companies have fallen for the first time since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. According to a study by Nova Gazeta Europe, the incomes of defense sector employees offered in job vacancies fell by 10% compared to 2024, while salaries continued to rise on average across the country.
The "salary race" peaked in the first year of the war. A sharp increase in the volume of government orders caused a shortage of personnel and ensured a rapid growth in the incomes of defense workers. However, by 2025, as noted by the first deputy head of the Ministry of Industry and Trade Vasily Osmakov, "the economy has come to a breaking point" - enterprises are no longer able to expand production by simply increasing the number of employees and overtime.
Researchers who analyzed almost 40 million ads on hh.ru, also found out: the peak of hiring in the defense industry came in the first year of the war - in August 2022 the MIC accounted for almost 2% of all vacancies aggregator. However, by the summer of 2025, the dynamics changed dramatically: in three months, defense companies published only 34.5 thousand vacancies against 52 thousand for the same period last year. Even in January 2022, before the invasion, hiring rates were higher than the current ones.
At the same time, in the fall of 2024, the State Duma announced a possible deficit of 400 thousand workers, but these forecasts did not come true. By mid-2025, it became clear: most factories had reached the limit of their capacity.
At the same time, drone and missile manufacturers remain an exception. According to New Europe and the American Institute for the Study of War, revenue at drone companies has grown 2.5 times since 2022, and wages at such companies continue to rise. Kalashnikov Concern, Tactical Missile Armament, and plants producing aircraft and rocket engines are named among the actively expanding companies.
The general trend, however, remains the opposite: the defense industry has reached its capacity limit by 2025 and can no longer increase production through mass hiring.
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