Twitch unblocks accounts that carried ads for sanctioned Russian college tied to kamikaze drone production

The Insider confirmed that the streamers’ accounts had been unbanned. Alabuga banners were removed from the channels.

Twitch blocked about 15 channels promoting Alabuga on April 25. Sports outlets initially said the bans would last 30 days, but the accounts were restored after three days.

Anti-war YouTube users and bloggers are also circulating a list of creators who promoted Alabuga. The list’s description says the videos “create a false impression of Alabuga’s activities as exclusively educational or technological” and that creators who ran the ads, knowingly or not, help justify the militarization of education and human rights violations.

“I don’t have a specific goal. Ideally, of course, these accounts would be blocked, but I would also be satisfied if Alabuga advertising on YouTube stopped completely. I’m just trying to document it, while others can handle the complaints, restrictions, and so on,” the list’s author told The Insider.

Alabuga Polytech is located in the Alabuga special economic zone in Russia’s Tatarstan region. After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, production of Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones — known in their Russian-made versions as Geran, or “Geranium” — was set up at the college, with the involvement of underage students. The college is under U.S. and EU sanctions.

In March, the independent science-focused outlet T-invariant reported that Alabuga Polytech and the Alabuga SEZ had launched a major advertising campaign to recruit college students to assemble attack drones.

The outlet said it obtained nearly 6.5 gigabytes of promotional videos in which underage students openly discuss working in drone production. It said the materials marked the first time Alabuga-linked ads directly mentioned combat drone assembly; notably, they showed workshops featuring the distinctive black drones.

In one video, a 16-year-old first-year student says she expects to start earning a significant salary next year by assembling drones, and that her parents are proud of her. Another student says he already earns 150,000 rubles ($1,900) a month by working as an incoming inspection specialist at the “largest drone production plant in the world.” Another participant in the videos says his father called him “a real man” after he began working at the factory. The archive was titled “Lodki” (lit. “Boats”) — a term open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers say Alabuga has used for several years to disguise its production of combat drones.