The Russian president’s special representative for Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said that consultations on this issue had been held, but that there were “no signs of progress” and he did not see any. According to him, the issue falls more within the competence of migration authorities and law enforcement agencies than the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which has been dealing with it recently.
Afghanistan’s ambassador to Russia, Hassan Gul Hassan, also did not give a date for the arrival of Afghan workers. He said: “We will try to make this opportunity available as soon as possible. At the moment, the process is underway”, without specifying details.
Kabulov first announced talks about Afghan migrants in March. In May, Afghanistan’s trade minister Nuriddin Azizi said that both Moscow and Kabul were interested in such cooperation; at the time, he named the language barrier as the main obstacle and said that a joint commission was already working to overcome it.
The possibility of bringing in Afghan workers is being discussed against the backdrop of a labor shortage in Russia: according to estimates by the Higher School of Economics, the economy is short of 2.6 million workers, and the Ministry of Labor predicted that by 2030 the deficit could exceed 3.1 million people. So far, it has not been officially reported how many migrants from Afghanistan may come to Russia.
In 2025, about 100 Afghans worked in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Tatarstan — as painters, welders, and electricians. The head of the Russian Business Center in Afghanistan, Rustam Khabibullin, spoke of an agreement to send about 1,000 more workers to Russia, who were planned to be used in agriculture and infrastructure restoration in Chechnya, Dagestan, Krasnodar Krai, as well as in the occupied parts of Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk regions.
Last year, Russia removed the Taliban, which rules in Afghanistan, from its list of terrorist organizations and then became the first and only country to officially recognize the Islamic Emirate. After that, Moscow announced “significant prospects” for cooperation, with an emphasis on projects in the energy, transport, agriculture, and infrastructure sectors.
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