2/ A recent investigation by Novaya Gazeta Evropa found that that Russia has lost up to 1.7 million workers, or about 2.2% of the country's workforce, since the invasion of February 2022. A report by the Okno Group highlights the impact that this has had on public transport.
3/ In the city of Novokuznetsk in southwestern Siberia, the Piteravto bus company is only able to run 153 of its 210 buses due to a shortage of drivers. The city's other transport companies are also suffering shortfalls, causing cancellations and long delays on bus lines.
4/ At least 30 of Russia's regions have reported similar shortages of transport workers. The Siberian city of Omsk has a shortage of 850 drivers. Krasnoyarsk has a shortfall of 20-25%, while Krasnoyarsk has lost 50% of its bus drivers. Novosibirsk lacks over 450 drivers.
5/ The cause is the same: as a resident of Abakan in southern Siberia says, "everyone who knew how to drive left for the Special Military Operation under contract for the front-line millions [of rubles]". Military wages and conditions are seen as far better than those at home.
6/ A Novosibirsk city deputy says: "Salaries in this sector are not bad: about 75,000 ($875) in the commercial sector, 100,000 ($1,170) in the municipal sector. But many men prefer to go to the Special Military Operation to get 200,000-plus ($2,335).
7/ "In addition, the disgusting working conditions in public transport, specifically on municipal routes, have an impact: at the final stops it is good if there is a bio-toilet, but not everywhere. Somewhere there are wooden toilets.
8/ "Toilets are not cleaned very often, they look downright bad. Drivers have nowhere to rest: when there is a shift change, a driver can stand for an hour or two. There used to be rest rooms, but now there are none. They don't even have a place to eat.
9/ "And this applies to 95 per cent of stops."
While many drivers have gone to the front lines, many more have gone to work in support of the wider war effort. The independent transport analyst Vladislav Bulgakov notes that around a million people are involved with the war.
10/ "It is not only about the military. There are those who work on construction sites in Mariupol, various suppliers to the Defence Ministry and so on. Accordingly, there is a great demand for lorry drivers, primarily. Transport companies began to think, do and raise wages.
11/ "As a result, those drivers who had not even thought about it before went to work on lorries. There is another problem here: transport companies, unlike public transport, operate in purely market conditions.
12/ "They have the opportunity, for example, to raise the fare, remove some costs and, as a result, raise wages. Public transport in cities has none of this: even if we are talking about subsidised routes, the regulated tariff includes minimum wages, minimum profitability."
13/ Bulgakov comments that this is a problem "not only in public transport, but in all blue-collar jobs. People go to the army, to defence industrial enterprises that offer huge salaries, to big business, which is more flexible and can offer more."
What's interesting is that russia has lost 1.7 million workers. This is three times the casualties figure that Ukraine claims they have inflicted on russia. So that should confirm that over one million working-age men have left russia and not come back. And in fact even more than that when you take into account that many of the casualties were taken from prisons (so, people who had already been removed from the workforce) and russian unemployment is at an all-time low (so the workforce has been replenished as much as possible from the local population).
This labor shortage is not just in bus driving. All sectors of russian economy are affected; especially those where the work is harsh and the pay is low; in other words, the jobs that are actually useful.
Ukraine took some ground in Kursk. How long will it be held? How much more could be taken? How much of russia's fresh reserves can be chewed up? Will the exchange be favorable to Ukraine in the end? Will russia have to pull back troops from other Ukraine, or at least stop sending new troops to the Donbas so as to send them to Kursk instead?
In the meantime, though, russians continue gaining ground in the Toretsk direction.
