Natalia Klyueva started her hunt for a new Moscow job in February — just before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the west’s wave of retaliatory sanctions. Three months later, the 46-year-old is finding that her 20 years of high-level sales experience mean little in a corporate world transformed by war.
“There is no demand. To be honest, I’m horrified,” Klyueva said, describing business in Russia as “frozen” while western firms have “melted away” from the country. “I have two children, I have unpaid loans, I have unfinished construction work . . . and I’m sitting at home, cooking borscht like a fool. ”
Her experience of a changing job market is one indicator of the way sanctions and western business embargoes are slowly filtering into the Russian economy — bringing shuttered shops and disrupted supply chains — despite President Vladimir Putin’s efforts to shield the country from the effects of the war on Ukraine.
In a country where a large proportion of workers are employed by the state, and with recently approved pension and minimum wage hikes, most Russians have not experienced dramatic changes to daily life. Buoyant revenues from oil and gas exports have also given the Kremlin the means to offer incentives to the private sector to furlough, rather than lay off, workers. Unemployment has remained at about 4 percent, avoiding the spikes seen during the pandemic. And inflation, which reached a two-decade high of 17.8 percent in April, has begun to slow.