KSE Institute has published new research on how another wave of mobilization in Russia could affect the wages and incomes of those who remain in the workforce. Mobilization would pull more men out of the civilian labor market, but it would also allow Russia to conscript soldiers by force instead of attracting them with large signing bonuses. Drawing on 16 months of vacancy data, regional decrees, and casualty data, the study’s author estimates how these two factors could affect wages. A labor shortage could push wages up, but giving up large one-time signing bonuses would likely cause far greater losses. As a result, the total income of low-skilled workers could decline. This also raises the political cost of a potential new mobilization for the Kremlin. The number of vacancies in the defense industry has dropped significantly. Over the past year, weapons and aircraft manufacturers cut posted vacancies by 37%, other defense enterprises by 14%, and drone manufacturers by 13%. Meanwhile, the number of vacancies in the civilian sector rose by 7%. Wages in the defense industry grew by 6%, compared to 15% in the civilian sector. Most new civilian-sector vacancies, however, came from a handful of state-funded megaprojects involving Kremlin-connected and foreign contractors. Without them, the number of vacancies in the rest of the civilian sector fell by 3%. The army primarily targets workers with no experience or qualifications. 94% of military vacancies require neither work experience nor qualifications, compared with 46% of civilian vacancies. Roughly a third of defense-industry vacancies target the same group of workers. The exception is Alabuga, a drone production hub in Tatarstan, which competes with military recruitment offices for workers of the same profile but offers them roughly six times lower pay than a military contract would. One-time signing bonuses function as a marketing tool. The median bonus size rose from 1.5 million to 2.5 million rubles over two years. Many of these payments have a limited validity period. They can be extended monthly, temporarily cut, and then raised again. The size of the payments appears to have little connection to local economic conditions. Regions raise them after military casualties increase, which points to a steadily shrinking pool of people willing to sign a contract voluntarily. The army offers far more than these workers could earn in the civilian sector. Contract pay alone is roughly five times higher than the wages of the low-skilled workers the army is trying to attract. Adding the signing bonus, one year of service is worth, on a median basis, roughly nine years of local income — ranging from about seven years in Kirov Oblast to nearly 14 years in Kabardino-Balkaria. On top of this come veteran benefits, including loan forgiveness, land plots, and grants. The outflow of men from the civilian labor market has somewhat accelerated wage growth. In regions that sent more men to war, real wages grew faster. According to the study’s estimates, every 100,000 men who leave the civilian labor market is associated with an additional increase in real wages of roughly 0.1–0.2 percentage points. However, mobilization would largely replace contract recruitment, which already brings in around 400,000 men per year. Therefore, an additional labor shortage would only arise from mobilization numbers exceeding that level. If mobilization fully replaced contract recruitment, the additional increase in real wages would be roughly 0.1–0.2 p.p. for a mobilization of 500,000 people, and 0.6–1.2 p.p. for a mobilization of one million. The losses from ending one-time signing bonuses would far exceed any possible wage increase. The army accounts for more than a quarter of all the money offered to this group of workers, even though it recruits only about 4% of them. Signing bonuses alone amount to roughly 1 trillion rubles a year. The additional wage growth from labor shortages is estimated at 20–200 billion rubles. Meanwhile, the one-time payments the state could forgo under mobilization would be 5 to over 50 times larger. The likely outcome would be a decline in the total income of low-skilled workers. Everyone who remains in the workforce would see a small wage increase. By contrast, the men and regions currently receiving money from military contracts — especially those with the lowest local wages — would lose the most from the end of signing bonuses. According to the author’s calculations, the additional wage increase could offset the lost payments only with a mobilization of roughly 3.5–6.5 million men — far more than the scenarios considered in the study.