Russian companies, state corporations and government agencies have posted more than 2,500 vacancies for military and mobilization registration specialists, according to a count by the outlet Agentstvo based on HeadHunter data. Nearly 1,300 of those listings appeared in the last week alone. By comparison, only 145 such vacancies were posted in all of 2021, and about 500 in 2022 after mobilization began.
The growth is especially noticeable in Moscow, where 330 vacancies appeared in the past week for the query "military registration," 22 for "mobilization training" and six for "mobilization department." A week earlier, according to the project "To Be Continued," there were 55 and 17 such listings respectively. Employers include the Moscow government, the housing utility company Zhilishchnik, the city's civil defense department, the Defense Ministry's Central Housing and Utilities Directorate, the state space corporation Roscosmos, MTS Security and Almaz-Antey Telecommunications. Salaries range from 15,000 rubles per month for part-time work to 150,000 rubles per month.
Beyond the capital, enterprises in St. Petersburg, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod, Belgorod, Kazan, Ufa, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg and other cities have published such vacancies in the last three days. Among the employers are the Pirogov Center for Traumatology and Orthopedics, the Bakhrushin Theater Museum, St. Petersburg's Arsenal design bureau, the insurer SOGAZ-Med, Russian Post, the Stavropol office of Rostelecom and a company from Oleg Deripaska's En+ holding.
Human rights advocates explain the surge in demand differently. Lawyers from Kaloy Akhilgov's team on military law link it to bureaucratic reasons: authorities have increased the burden on employers for maintaining military registration and introduced fines for violations. Timofey Vaskin, a lawyer at the "School of the Conscript," believes that companies and structures connected to the state know about an approaching mobilization or expect one. The project "Idite Lesom" suggested that such listings could be a way of recruiting people for the war.
Earlier, experts at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote that Russian authorities are building a legal framework for a possible new mobilization and the introduction of martial law. In particular, they pointed to a law allowing contracts with the Defense Ministry for those convicted of participation in organized crime groups and drug smuggling, as well as changes to the regulations on the National Guard, which during mobilization is tasked with protecting the population from various "dangers."