Moscow and Minsk: Migration as a Tool of Power

Research published in autumn 2025 by the Institute of General Genetics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) documented the gradual replacement of the ethnic Russian population, above all in the country's 16 cities with more than one million inhabitants, home to roughly a quarter of all Russians.

Many of these cities are already highly diverse, and ethnic Russians are no longer a majority. School classes with no Russian pupils have been recorded in the Moscow region and beyond – a trend the RAN links to both immigration and the fact that immigrants have a birth rate twice that of ethnic Russians.

Nowhere is the demographic shift more visible than in Moscow. The capital's ethnic Russian population stood at nearly 90% in 2010 and had fallen to less than 70% by 2021. If current trends continue, researchers predict that the Slavic population will account for just 20% by 2045.

"This shift in the capital's ethno-cultural makeup has been under way for a long time and is outpacing the broader decline of the Russian population across the country. Official statistics and census data have largely glossed over the process, even as Russian nationalists have been drawing attention to it for decades", the press department of the Russian Volunteer Corps (RDK), which is fighting the Russian army in Ukraine, told Statement.

The Kremlin Looks East for Workers

Security risks stemming from the war in Ukraine have dampened interest in Russian citizenship. When the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the Krasnogorsk terrorist attack in March 2024, in which more than 150 people died, the Kremlin moved to tighten migration rules for immigrants from several former Soviet republics. Only Tajik nationals were detained in connection with the attack.

Critics have labeled the measures xenophobic. Moscow's official position, however, points in the opposite direction: the Kremlin formally recognizes the "need to intensify the fight against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance", and President Vladimir Putin has personally described diversity as the "foundation of Russia's greatness and strength".

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared in April 2025 that "measures to reduce the number of immigrant workers in Russia hardly meet the country's interests". The Kremlin's response has been to look further afield. It plans to offset the Central Asian shortfall by recruiting between hundreds of thousands and one million workers from India, whose numbers, according to Interior Ministry statistics from January, are already growing significantly year on year.

Lukashenko's Labor Gamble

"If you want to invite Tajiks, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, Syrians, Afghans, anyone, go ahead. There are trade unions, youth organizations, and parties – involve them", Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko declared in January 2025. By April he had grown more specific, expressing interest in recruiting 150,000 Pakistanis, preferably accompanied by their families.

The 150,000 migrants alone would make up around 2% of the country's current population, without counting their typically large families. Were they settled in the Minsk region, they would account for roughly a tenth of its residents.

For a country where non-European migrants were a rarity until very recently, the ambition marks a notable shift. Precise data is hard to come by, but a labor shortage in Belarus is widely assumed. The reality on the ground, however, remains modest: as of January 2026, just over 200 Pakistanis were recorded as working in the country.

The context is not hard to find. Since the violent suppression of protests against the fraudulent 2020 elections, in which around 15% of the population took part and which spread to several dozen factories, more than half a million Belarusians, most of them of working age, have left the country.

Settlers for Russia, Pawns for Belarus

Not all migrants crossing into Russia and Belarus are headed for the labor market. The Kremlin also relocates tens to hundreds of thousands of people from Asia and Africa to occupied Ukrainian territory each year, apparently with the aim of consolidating its hold on the land. "We are building new mosques and churches, new people are moving here", a volunteer in the Russian army confirmed to Statement.

Since 2022, there are numerous media reports that Russia has actively recruited Africans studying in Russia, Arabs from Palestine or Lebanon, Kazakhs, Indians, Nepalis, Somalis and others into its armed forces. Several of those subsequently taken prisoner by Ukraine have claimed they were brought to the front under false pretenses. Two Ugandan captives featured in an interview published on 10 June offer one such example, though their interrogators do not always accept these accounts at face value.

Belarus takes a different approach to migration altogether. According to Polish investigators and the migrants themselves, the Belarusian authorities equip those passing through with ladders, wire cutters and other tools for breaching the Polish-Belarusian border. Polish border guards have also reported that specialists from the Middle East are building tunnels across the frontier.

The migrants are brought to Minsk by air on valid Belarusian tourist visas, serving as a tool of hybrid warfare against Poland and the European Union. Warsaw responded by beginning construction of a border fence in January 2022, with the basic structure in place by early summer of that year.

Barring another major terrorist attack or an end to the war in Ukraine, significant changes to migration policy in either country seem unlikely. A new attack would almost certainly bring further restrictions, while a peace settlement would likely rekindle interest in legal migration to Russia and Russian citizenship.

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