Alabuga Polytech in Russia’s Tatarstan launches social media campaign to recruit minors for the assembly of Shahed drones

Alabuga Polytech and the Alabuga Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Russia’s Tatarstan have launched a large-scale advertising campaign to recruit more students to assemble Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones, which are widely used by the Russian military in the invasion of Ukraine. The independent science-focused outlet T-invariant obtained nearly 6.5 gigabytes of promotional videos in which underage students openly discuss their work assembling drones. For the first time in Alabuga-related promotional materials, the production of combat drones is explicitly mentioned, and workshops responsible for churning out the distinctive black UAVs are shown.

In the videos, students in different grades describe the working conditions and salaries, saying second-year students can earn 150,000 rubles a month ($1,900), and third-year students 350,000 ($4,500) — significantly higher than the 87,000 ruble ($1,100) median monthly salary in the region. In one video, 16-year-old first-year student Darina says that next year she will begin earning money assembling drones, adding that her parents are proud of her. In another video, second-year student Alexander says he is already earning 150,000 rubles working as an incoming inspection specialist at the “largest drone production plant in the world.” One young man in a video says that after he started working in drone production, his father started calling him “a real man.”

The video archive is labeled “Lodki” (lit. “Boats”), which is the code name Alabuga has used for several years for combat drone production, as previously noted by open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers.

The Insider was able to confirm that at least some of the teenagers featured in the promotional videos do in fact study at Alabuga Polytech and came there from different regions of the country. Among them are students from the cities of Nizhnekamsk and Naberezhnye Chelny, as well as a village in Tatarstan’s Bugulma District, while one is from Moscow.