Russians pushed to work six-day week and volunteer in weapons factories to boost war effort
Russians working in arms factories are being pushed to work a six-day week to feed the Kremlin’s armies with ammunition, the British Ministry of Defence has claimed.
It said that the Kremlin had created a “Soviet-style sense of societal compulsion” to pressure Russians into supporting the war in Ukraine.
“Russian state-backed media and business groups have petitioned the economic ministry to authorise six-day weeks for workers in the face of the economic demands of the war, apparently without any additional pay,” the ministry said.
The Kremlin has shifted the Russian economy onto a war-footing, prioritising military manufacturing over civilian products. Although Russia’s economy only shrank by 2 per cent last year, analysts said that a huge increase in state spending on the military disguised a drop in the civilian economy and standards of living.
The surge in arms spending includes the repurposing some civilian businesses as weapons and drone factories.
In Izhevsk, a city 630 miles east of Moscow, a shopping centre is being turned into an ammunition factory and, further south in Tambov, employees at a bread factory have switched to assembling drones instead of baking.
The attritional, artillery-centric style of the war in Ukraine means that both sides’ armaments industries are running on overdrive to supply shells, missiles and drones.
The Kremlin has signed deals with Iran to buy drones and agreed a contract to produce them under licence at a new factory in Kazan, in central Russia.
However, Russia’s mobilisation and an outflow of people escaping the country have contributed to a shortage of workers. Some factories have tried to increase recruitment from former Soviet Central Asia, a traditional source of cheap labour.
Margarita Simonyan, one of the Kremlin’s main propagandists, said last week that Russians working in offices should volunteer for a two-hour shift in a weapons factory after work.
“Let's pull ourselves together because we can’t let industry fail,” she said. “Are we not ready to go out after work for two hours to help while this is all going on?”
