Hundreds of Thousands of Russians Are Beginning to Rebel—The Kremlin Fears the Unrest Could Spiral Out of Control
MOSCOW — Imagine a railway company that has deployed 30,000 armed security personnel against its own workforce, equipping them with firearms up to 20mm in caliber. Why? Because that corporate behemoth employs 700,000 workers, and 200,000 of them are on the chopping block. The remainder are being forced onto unpaid leave, their wages are evaporating, and they have been strictly forbidden from speaking out.
This company is Russia’s largest enterprise: RZD, or Russian Railways. More critically, it is the indispensable logistical backbone of Vladimir Putin’s war machine. Every tank, every artillery shell, and every drop of fuel hurtling toward the front lines travels on these steel rails. And that backbone is not merely staggering—it is collapsing under the weight of $51 billion in debt, a sixty-fold erosion in profits, and a staggering backlog of 200 canceled trains every day.
Before 2022, RZD was a profitable corporate titan, shipping containers across Europe, timber to Finland, and grain to Baltic ports. But the war it services is slowly killing it. The Kremlin’s war economy, long touted by state media as a roaring engine of growth, has been exposed by the quiet rot of its transport sector as a house of cards. And beneath the surface, hundreds of thousands of Russians—along with a volatile new wave of imported foreign laborers—are beginning to rebel, fueling a quiet terror inside the Kremlin that the mounting unrest could soon spiral completely out of control.
A Catastrophic Logistical Chokehold
When the invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Western sanctions slammed shut RZD’s lucrative European trade routes overnight. Lithuania restricted transit to Kaliningrad, European commercial volume collapsed, and decades-old trade networks vanished. In response, the Kremlin pivoted east, attempting to build out the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) and the Trans-Siberian expansion projects as a new export corridor to China.
Putin touted the initiative as a modern Silk Road. But reality quickly intervened. When investment budgets were slashed by 25 percent to fund the escalating war in Ukraine, these expansion projects froze solid. The eastern route functions partially, but it comes nowhere close to replacing the vast European market, and the state lacks the capital to finish the necessary infrastructure.
Then came the fatal self-inflicted wound: the prioritization of military logistics. Transporting tanks, munitions, and fuel to the front lines was declared the absolute highest state priority. On paper, it made sense—an army cannot fight without supplies. But the real-world cost was devastating. Civil and commercial freight was not merely delayed; it was effectively brought to a standstill.
Factories waited weeks for raw materials, coal mines could not ship their products to ports, and commercial exporters watched their supply chains shatter. Clients fled RZD in droves because the answer to when shipments would arrive became a uniform “we do not know.” In logistics, a customer who finds an alternative never returns. The loss of revenue for RZD has been permanent.
Compounding this disaster was the shock of soaring interest rates. As the Russian Central Bank hiked rates to combat inflation, RZD’s massive pre-war debt of $11 billion ballooned to $51 billion, rendering it utterly unpayable. In the first nine months of 2025 alone, interest expenses doubled to 332 billion rubles, meaning the company was spending more servicing its debt than it was earning.
According to Sergey Alexenko, an analyst at the Nest Center in London, RZD is effectively bankrupt. Yet, Putin finds himself trapped in a ruthless geopolitical cul-de-sac. Why is the railway so utterly critical? Because Russia is not Europe. While nations like Germany boast interconnected highway systems in every corner, Russia features vast expanses of Siberia where paved roads between villages are virtually nonexistent. Spanning eleven time zones, the railway is the only reliable way to move heavy cargo. If the Kremlin wants to send a T-90 tank, howitzer shells, or jet fuel to the front, it goes by train. Without RZD, Russia’s war machine would be logistically paralyzed.
The Domino Effect of Corporate Collapse
The consequences of this decay are visible across the entire Russian economy. With 200 trains canceled daily and severe shortages of engineers and locomotive crews—some having fled low wages, others having been forcibly conscripted into the army—train speeds have been drastically reduced for safety. Operating high-speed trains on unmaintained tracks is an invitation to catastrophic derailments.
Furthermore, Ukraine’s cyber intelligence units have repeatedly targeted RZD’s coordination systems, compounding digital chaos onto physical decay. Crimea, the strategically vital peninsula annexed in 2014, represents the most vulnerable point of this collapse. Its land bridge is under constant drone threat, and its railway supply lines are narrowing. The Crimean garrison is not autosufficient; everything must be shipped from the mainland, and the system responsible for moving those supplies is rotting from within.
This rot is rippling directly into Russia’s domestic power grid and heavy industry. When coal cannot be transported, thermal power plants run out of fuel, sparking severe heating crises during freezing Siberian winters. When iron ore cannot move, steel mills shut down. Metallurgical freight transport dropped by more than 25 percent over a four-year period. As factories close, production plumps, exports dry up, tax revenues plunge, and the federal budget deficit balloons.
That growing deficit squeezes the war budget. When the war budget shrinks, fewer munitions reach the front. When munitions wane, casualties rise. And when casualties surge, the pressure for forced mobilization intensifies. A single rotting rail line can leave a soldier thousands of miles away at the front without ammunition—and replacing that fallen soldier is becoming increasingly difficult.
The management of RZD has begged the state for 200 billion rubles in emergency bailouts. The state handed over 65 billion—not even a third of what was required—because Russia’s National Wealth Fund has been largely exhausted by war spending. When RZD proposed converting 400 billion rubles of debt into equity, the Central Bank flatly rejected the plan, citing severe risks to the national economy. When the state’s own central bank deems the rescue of its largest enterprise too dangerous to undertake, the gravity of the crisis is unmistakable.
In a display of staggering irony during a severe debt crisis in 2024, RZD actually purchased the Moscow Tower skyscraper for $2.4 billion. By 2026, that luxury skyscraper, along with Moscow’s Rizhsky station and the Lyubertsy depot, was put on the auction block—a textbook portrait of state-managed economic delusion.
200,000 Pink Slips and the Shadow of Armed Security
If RZD’s implosion were merely a balance-sheet crisis, it might be manageable. But riding on those deteriorating rails are the livelihoods of 700,000 workers, and those lives are unraveling rapidly.
While official announcements claimed that only 15 percent of headquarters staff—roughly 6,000 people—would be cut, leaked internal documents reveal a far more draconian reality. Out of 700,100 employees, management plans to retain only 500,000 by September 2026. Two hundred thousand people will lose their jobs—a figure 33 times higher than the official admission.
For those who manage to keep their positions, the conditions are grim. Since the summer of 2025, employees have been subjected to mandatory “voluntary” unpaid leave of two to three days per month, with refusal carrying the immediate threat of termination. In February 2026, the company canceled its semiannual wage indexation. While official inflation soared above 10 percent, wages were bumped by a insulting 0.1 percent.
“Lately, the advance plus salary barely reaches 30,000 rubles,” shared an anonymous former RZD employee with over 25 years of experience. “I would advise anyone to get out. It is not worth your psychological and physical health.”
Yet hearing these voices is extraordinarily difficult because public speech has been outlawed. Complaints leak out exclusively through anonymous Telegram channels where no one shows their face. In Russia’s deeply repressive political environment, open rebellion by workers in a massive state enterprise is nearly impossible—which explains why the Kremlin deployed 30,000 armed security personnel equipped with heavy weapons throughout the rail network. The deployment of an internal army against railway workers is the most concrete proof available of how deeply the regime fears their rage.
This crisis hits hardest in Russia’s monogorods—monothematic company towns scattered across Siberia, the Urals, and the shores of Lake Baikal. In these isolated settlements, RZD is the sole employer, the sole funder of schools, and the sole sponsor of hospitals. When RZD pulls back, the town dies, the population migrates, and generations-old communities turn into ghost towns.
A Second Front: Foreign Labor Unrest
As domestic workers harbor their grievances in silence under the shadow of state weapons, a secondary and potentially more explosive wave of rebellion has erupted from an unexpected quarter: imported foreign labor.
To offset the catastrophic demographic drain of men sent to the front lines, the Kremlin established a massive air bridge between Beijing and Moscow, bringing in tens of thousands of foreign workers to fill empty seats on assembly lines, behind steering wheels, and at construction sites. The number of work permits issued to Chinese citizens surged toward 100,000, concentrated heavily in the Russian Far East—Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Amur, and Yakutia—where they toil in Rosneft refineries and infrastructure projects.
However, these workers have been subjected to severe exploitation, earning wages far below Russian averages and being assigned the most grueling jobs. Worse still, even these meager wages are frequently withheld.
This systemic failure triggered a stunning confrontation on the streets of Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Hundreds of Chinese workers staged a massive street protest, holding up banners that read directly: “Putin, help us” and “Sechin, give us our money.” The workers were employed by a Chinese subcontractor working on a Rosneft refinery who had reportedly taken the payroll funds and fled.
Left stranded without pay and unable to return home, the workers staged a march and an open-air sit-in. In doing so, they inadvertently exploited a profound legal blind spot: the Kremlin could not crack down on Chinese citizens with the same brutal efficiency it applies to domestic dissidents, fearing a diplomatic rupture with Beijing. For a regime obsessed with absolute sovereignty, watching foreign workers parade through Russian streets demanding intervention from the country’s paramount leader exposed an extraordinary administrative weakness.
The Fragile Illusion of Stability
For years, the Kremlin insisted that its war economy was thriving, pointing to inflated GDP figures driven entirely by military spending. But RZD’s freight volume—the single most reliable and unmanipulable economic indicator in any nation—exposed that narrative as a falsehood.
By 2025, freight volume had plunged to levels not seen since 2009. The construction sector’s cargo fell 20 percent, coal exports collapsed, and the broader economy began contracting. In March 2026, Russia’s GDP growth dipped firmly into negative territory at -1.8 percent.
Putin’s options for rescuing his primary transportation network have vanished. The National Welfare Fund is depleted, the Central Bank refuses to underwrite toxic debt, and the public is sinking deeper into economic despair. The luxury skyscrapers bought during a debt crisis are being sold off, while the rails beneath the nation’s feet quietly splinter.
Ultimately, RZD is too big to fail, but far too expensive to save. As hundreds of thousands of workers face destitution, and as the structural arteries of the Eurasian landmass harden into rust, the Kremlin is learning a harsh historical lesson: a nation cannot indefinitely devour its own economic backbone to feed a war without eventually facing a reckoning from the very people built to sustain it.
