Wages at Russian defense companies decreased last month for the first time since the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, even as average pay across the country continued to rise, according to a report by the exiled news platform Novaya Gazeta Europe.

Analyzing nearly 600,000 job listings from 1,200 military enterprises on the job site hh.ru, Novaya Gazeta Europe discovered that salaries in the defense sector dropped by 10% in August 2025 compared to the same month in 2024.

The most significant wage increases occurred during the initial year of the conflict, when a surge in government contracts led to a labor shortage, driving salaries upward.

However, by 2025, Deputy Industry Minister Vasily Osmakov noted that the economy had reached a “turning point,” where factories could not increase production merely by hiring more workers or extending overtime.

Additionally, Novaya Gazeta Europe reported that defense recruitment peaked in August 2022, at which point the sector represented nearly 2% of all job vacancies.

By the summer of 2025, defense companies advertised only 34,500 job openings within three months, in stark contrast to 52,000 during the same timeframe the previous year. Even prior to the invasion, in January 2022, job postings exceeded current figures.

This slowdown challenges the warnings issued by the lower house of the State Duma in late 2024 about a potential shortfall of 400,000 defense workforce members. By mid-2025, many factories had already hit their production capacity limits.

An exception to this trend was seen among drone and missile manufacturers, where revenues for drone producers reportedly multiplied by 2.5 times since 2022, as highlighted by Novaya Gazeta Europe and the U.S.-based Institute for the Study of War, with salaries still on the rise.