The number of unemployed people in Russia has surpassed 1.2 million

The number of registered unemployed Russians reached 1,243,000 people at the end of April. What's more, 735,000 of these people registered as unemployed between March and April of this year. These figures were reported by Russia’s Labor and Social Protection Minister, Anton Kotyakov, during a May 6 conference with President Vladimir Putin, focused on issues related to supporting the economy.

According to the Labor Ministry’s data, over 208,000 people lost their jobs after March 1 specifically. The ministry has reportedly allocated a total of 1.8 billion rubles (over $24.2 million) to finance unemployment benefits.

On April 29, Kotyakov announced that around 950,000 people in Russia were unemployed. At the time, he also estimated that the actual number of unemployed persons was around 3.7 million, and presumed that this number would grow to between 5 and 6 million people by the end of the year.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, Russia has declared “non-working days” from March 30 to May 11. The government has also announced two packages of economic and social aid, totalling over 2 trillion rubles (approximately $26.9 billion).