Russia Uses Pay, Perks To Promote Labor Migration To Occupied Areas In Ukraine

Promising signing bonuses, plump salaries, and living expenses, the Russian state is encouraging Russian doctors, judges, police officers, social workers, engineers, and others to work in Russian-occupied parts of Ukraine in what critics call a systematic attempt to Russify regions from which many residents have fled or been forcibly transferred.

Under Article 49 of the 1949 Geneva Convention, of which Russia is a signatory, transferring “parts” of an occupying country’s population to occupied territory constitutes a war crime. Moscow, however, frames these transfers as essential for the social welfare and “reconstruction” of Russian-held parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhya regions, which the Kremlin baselessly calls Russia’s “new regions.”

How many Russian civilians have gone on short-term work assignments or accepted permanent jobs in these occupied areas since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 is unclear. Russia’s official statistics agency does not release population data related to Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.

In September 2023, though, the Russian central bank noted an increasingly frequent outflow of Russian labor – particularly in construction, agriculture, and transportation – to the four regions. The labor migrants, the bank reported, came primarily from Siberia, and central and southern Russia.

That trend, which builds on Russia’s claimed distribution of over 3.2 million passports in these regions, could raise the question “of how to return territories to Ukraine where there are no Ukrainian citizens,” commented Kyiv-based political scientist Mikhail Savva, a Russian émigré scholar who writes on migration.

The exact number of Ukrainians who have left these areas since the invasion, and how many remain, is also unknown. Many have fled westward, but Putin and another Russian official stand accused by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of war crimes over the illegal deportation and transfer of Ukrainian children from occupied areas to Russia.

However, Savva’s question does not exist for Moscow, which has staged widely criticized elections in these areas, imposed Russian law, and announced openings in the regions for new judges and 42,000 new police officers.

State-run Russian media outlets depict the short-term trips by public employees to occupied Ukraine as missions of mercy – a heartfelt effort, as one nurse who traveled to Mariupol put it, to restore well-being. Bouquets of flowers and laudatory press coverage mark these employees’ return to Russia.

Reports vary about the extent to which these missions by government employees are voluntary or coerced.

One participant in the Russian discussion forum T-Zh asked on February 26 whether a person “ordered” to travel to these territories “for the organization of trainings and for sharing experience” could decline. The forum’s majority view: Either go or resign.

But the Kremlin has made sure that money is part of the motivation as well.

Just under two weeks after he declared the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhya regions to be part of Russia in September 2022, President Vladimir Putin began offering financial incentives for Russian civilians to go to these occupied areas of Ukraine.

The size of the incentives underlines this mission’s importance for the Kremlin: In an October 17, 2022, decree, Putin ordered that both state employees and civilians who are not part of the civil service and travel to these regions on short-term work assignments receive double wages and a per diem of 8,480 rubles ($91). That is more than 12 times the minimum per diem Russian law sets for business trips within Russia; it’s nearly three and a half times the minimum per diem for trips abroad.

The decree also compels the government to cover “additional expenses,” which it does not define. It sets no limits for the payouts.

That means that the Russian government would pay a person on a monthlong assignment in the occupied territories nearly 254,500 rubles ($2,742) per month -- more than double Russia’s highest average regional monthly wage, according to 2023 Rosstat data reported by Komsomolskaya Pravda.

How much Moscow has paid in total to cover such assignments since 2022 is unclear.

By looking to professionals from Russia, rather than locals, for such assignments, Moscow “is trying to ensure primarily the loyalty” of groups who can serve as “instruments of state propaganda,” said Savva, who works at Kyiv’s Center for Civil Liberties, a nongovernmental think tank.

"A lot has been destroyed, and in order to change the composition of the population, you need to offer something to people,” he charged.

Some of the largest financial incentives are paid to Russian doctors. Roughly a year after Russia’s full-scale invasion, the state-run Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported medical facilities in Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhya had less than 50 percent of their full staff and no “subspecialists,” a term that relates to fields such as cardiology, oncology, and endocrinology.

On February 14, Putin ordered that doctors taking part in a government program to encourage physicians to work in rural Russia receive a onetime 2 million ruble ($21,500) bonus for working in the Donetsk, Kherson, Luhansk, and Zaporizhzhya regions -- a rate otherwise only offered in Russia’s Arctic, Far East, and Far North, the daily Izvestiya reported.

Nurses, paramedics, and midwives operating under a separate government program will receive a onetime bonus of 1 million rubles ($10,800).

How many such medical professionals have since gone to Russian-occupied Ukraine is unclear. Ukraine’s Center for National Resistance, a website run by the Interior Ministry’s Special Forces, and Russian state media report regularly about doctors from throughout Russia visiting the occupied territories, but RFE/RL could not independently verify the information.

Petro Andryushchenko, an adviser to the displaced mayor of the Donetsk region city of Mariupol, Vadym Boychenko, claimed that Russian medical professionals come to Mariupol -- an Azov Sea port that came under Russian control in May 2022 after a devastating siege -- in small, organized groups as if on shifts, and live and eat apart from ordinary Mariupol residents.

Andryushchenko, like other Ukrainian officials, questioned whether these visiting Russians actually want to be in the devastated city. He believes they make the trip if their home region in Russia “is on duty there,” and responsible for supplying personnel.

"I don't know how they persuade them,” he added.

Apart from medical personnel, another Russian government program was extended to the four occupied regions in October 2023 to encourage teachers, hailed by Russian Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov as “heroes,” to move there.

Ukrainian Interior Ministry spokesperson Andriy Yusov asserted that Russian specialists who come to these regions understand that “that they are part of a large occupation corps, for the most part, and they understand the local population’s negative attitude toward them.”

But one 43-year-old Russian social worker killed in November 2023 in the Kherson region, Larisa Ivanova, understood only that the work was a chance to make money, a colleague told the independent news site Bumaga (Paper).

Ivanova, a single mother from northern Russia’s Leningrad region, went voluntarily because she could earn “two to three times” as much money as she could at home, friends said, Bumaga reported.

Russian job-search sites’ ads routinely offer housing accommodation and food for long-term positions ranging from odd-jobbers to nuclear-power engineers and construction workers.

Plans have been announced for several thousand new buildings in the occupied territories as well as a railway line this year running across them from Russia’s Rostov region to the Russian-occupied Crimean Peninsula.

Andryushchenko reckons that “all these specialists” from Russia “don't come forever,” but Russia’s 2023 offer of heavily discounted, 2 percent annual mortgages for new constructions in the occupied territories could suggest otherwise. Putin has proposed extending the discount to existing buildings as well.

How much any of these labor migrants understand about the conditions in which they’ll be working is unclear. Colleagues of one road builder from St. Petersburg killed in Ukraine, Dmitry Chuprov, told Bumaga that he did not know he would be so close to the fighting as to see smoke and hear explosions.

Though the Kremlin posthumously awarded Chuprov an Order of Courage, the financial benefits that brought him to Ukraine reportedly ended upon his death.