Russia's transport sector is facing severe labour shortages as many workers have been seduced away to support the country’s ongoing war effort by higher pay and better conditions leaving no one to drive Russia’s buses, reports Siberian Realities.

With an average salary of around RUB100,000 a month ($1,163) for a state-owned company, and less in the private sector, that can’t compete with the more RUB200,000, or more, military drivers can earn.

Now municipal transport in Russia’s vast hinterland is in crisis. The Piteravto bus company in the city of Novokuznetsk in southwestern Siberia has 210 buses but only 153 are in service due to a shortage of drivers.

At least 30 of Russia's regions have reported similar shortages of transport workers with 20-25% shortages of the needed labour and rising to over 50% in the worst affect regions. The queues at the bus stops, an essential service for most residents in the regions, have become long as buses arrive later or not at all.

Russia’s unemployment rate has fallen to a post-Soviet low of 2.6% in July as the so-called special military operation sucks men out of the labour pool. A recent investigation by Novaya Gazeta Evropa found that that Russia has lost up to 1.7mn workers, or about 2.2% of the country's workforce, since the invasion of February 2022.

Pre-war many of these jobs were filled by migrant workers, but following the Crocus City Hall mall on March 22 that saw 145 people gunned down in the worst terrorist attack in more than a decade, authorities have run anti-immigrant sweeps and many of these transitory workers have chosen to stay home, making the labour crisis worse.

Despite record low unemployment in Russia, net arrivals from the so-called “near abroad” are very small in comparison to previous years. In January-May 2024, net arrivals were 29,000 people, mostly from Tajikistan. But that is down from the 116,000 net arrivals in January-May of in 2019.

The shortage is also making working conditions hellish which is pushing even more bus drivers to quit and take an easier job in the military. Work conditions are poor and getting worse, while those that are working are forced to work long shifts to try to close the gap.

These policies ended in tragedy when in May, a bus fell into the Moika river in St Petersburg, killing several passengers. The investigation later found that the exhausted immigrant driver had been forced to work a 20-hour shift and had fallen asleep at the wheel.

And the army has a huge demand for lorry drivers far away from the front line. Mariupol, the Ukrainian city that was taken by Russia in a eight-month battle that destroyed the city, is now being rebuilt and is one huge construction site that desperately needs lorry drivers, which is mirrored in the four regions that Russia annexed and is now trying to repopulate and rebuild cities.

The high demand and free spending from the military budget has driven up not only military wages, but also at the private company catering to the Defence Ministry’s heightened demand, which are also hiking wages. Municipal bus drivers’ wages, on the other hand, are fixed and controlled by the regional budgets.

In an attempt to address the shortage, like in WWII, regional authorities are trying to recruit women to do a job that has traditionally been done by men. Pay was recently hiked from the previous rate of RUB75,000 per month to RUB100,000 and perks, like kindergarten places, after-school programmes, hot school lunches, and children's camps for their children, are included in the package. However, the reception in Siberia has been lukewarm, as the work conditions remain poor. Bus routes have only a chemical or outdoor toilet at the end of the line where drivers arrive from a shift. There are no restrooms or catering facilities and the hours remain long, Siberian Realities reports.

"Well, women will come there, and eventually they'll find out that men sit behind the wheel for 18-20 hours a day. And who would go there under such conditions, even for RUB100,000?" Svetlana Ivanova, a resident of Novokuznetsk, told Siberian Realities.