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FNPR Newsletter. July 18, 2025

18.07.2025

July 18, 2025

Dear Colleagues,

This is our next newsletter on social, economic and political situation in Russia, its international policy, the FNPR activities and its positions on different issues.

The political and socio-economic situation in Russia remains generally stable. This assessment is confirmed by the most recent nationwide survey by the Public Opinion Foundation, conducted on July 11-13, 2025, revealing that 78% of respondents trust President Putin, and 79% of respondents positively assess his activities at the Head of State.

At the same time, recent months have become a time of broad discussion on the country’s socio-economic prospects against the backdrop of slowing global economy. According to the forecast of the Ministry of Economic Development published in April, Russia’s GDP will grow by 2.5% in 2025 and by 2.4% in 2026. As we've written before, in 2024 Russia's GDP had grown by 4.1%.

Necessary structural changes in the Russian economy became one of the main topics at the 27^th St. Petersburg International Economic Forum held on June 18-21 2025. As was noted by Mr. Maxim Oreshkin, the Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration and the Chairman of the Forum’s Organising Committee, in an interview with the Expert magazine on June 16, "In order for development to continue, the economy must step up, not forward, to the next technological and organisational level."

For their part, Russian trade unions are never tired of pointing out that serious improvement of the structure of the Russian economy is not possible without giving priority attention to the workers' needs. This includes not only the development of the public service sector, including healthcare and education, but also the sustainable real wage growth and ensuring healthy and safe working conditions.

The latter aspect, i.e. labour protection, was the focus of attention at the regular meeting of the FNPR Executive Committee held on 26 June 2025. The FNPR has consistently criticized state authorities for weakening supervision in the sphere of labour protection, specifically, for the conversion of a significant part of inspections into an online format along with the downsizing of state labour inspectorates. This is happening at a time when, according to the Federal Labour and Employment Service itself, there is an alarming trend of occupational injuries growth which amounted to 15.5% in five years from 2019 to 2024, including 11.4% growth in the number of fatal accidents at work.

Under the circumstances, the FNPR and its affiliates are building up their own labour inspection network and intensifying their activities. In 2024, they had a total of 655 labour inspectors who carried out about 15 thousand inspections and detected over 52 thousand violations (an increase of 53%). In 616 cases there was an immediate threat to life and health of workers, when labour inspectors suspended the work until the revealed violations were eliminated.

The 113th session of the International Labour Conference, held in Geneva in June 2025, provided an opportunity for the FNPR to reiterate its position on socio-economic issues in the international arena. Speaking at a plenary session of the world’s most representative tripartite body, the FNPR Chairman Sergey Chernogaev stressed that workers around the world needed a new social contract, the essential elements of which would be poverty eradication, full and productive employment, living wages, access to health care, education, social protection and justice for all.

A new social contract that ensures social progress and sustainable development can only be developed and implemented through inclusive social dialogue. At the global level, a new multilateral system of international relations based on equal cooperation among sovereign states is an essential prerequisite for an inclusive social dialogue.

As for the situation around Ukraine, the Russian armed forces continue to liberate territories with Russian population that have seceded from Ukraine and joined the Russian Federation in 2022 based on the results of referendums.

At the same time, discussions on the prospects for a peaceful settlement in Ukraine continue. In particular, when speaking with representatives of the leading world news agencies on June 19, President Putin stressed that Russia is open to negotiations, including with the leadership of the current Kiev regime. However, Russia wants a long-term solution addressing the root causes of the conflict. Such a settlement implies, in particular, restrictions on the supply of weapons to the Kiev regime to eliminate the threat to Russia and its people.

Putin noted that in the spring of 2022, during negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Istanbul, "we agreed on the permissible size of Ukraine’s armed forces, on types of weapons, on troop numbers, and we reached consensus on everything.” But then, under pressure from Ukraine’s Western allies, those agreements were thrown out. As a result, the conflict lasts to this day.

The President also called a "myth” and an “absurd fabrication" an allegation that Russia plans to attack Europe or NATO, and assured the journalists that Russia would continue to defend its interests while remaining open to cooperation and search for fair solutions on the world stage.

The relevance of the Russian demand for demilitarisation of Ukraine was once again confirmed when the report of the International Public Tribunal on the Crimes of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis on the war crimes of the armed forces of the Kiev regime committed in the city of Dzerzhinsk in Donetsk People’s Republic, was made public on June 26.

For their part, Russian trade unions continue to collect and deliver humanitarian aid to the civilian population of the war-affected regions.