Russian colleges are offering struggling students ‘one-year’ army contracts. Lawyers warn it’s a trap.

Russian colleges are offering failing students a new way to avoid expulsion: join the military for a year as a drone operator. Schools claim these “special contracts” can be terminated after 12 months, unlike standard service agreements, which remain in force until the end of Vladimir Putin’s “partial mobilization.” Lawyers warn there’s no such thing. The outlet Cherta examined how colleges are helping the Kremlin recruit soldiers for its war in Ukraine — and what students may actually be getting themselves into. Meduza summarizes the outlet’s reporting.

‘Special contracts’

In December 2025, an officer from the military program at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) dropped into a physics lecture and made an unusual pitch to students who were struggling academically.

“Not keeping up? Need to catch your breath, build some strength, or study a bit more?” he asked. “If you take academic leave, you could sign a contract with the Defense Ministry and spend a year doing something useful — both for yourself and for the homeland.”

Defense Ministry recruitment ads are hardly unusual in Russia; in fact, they are everywhere. But MIPT students were offered a special arrangement. The pay would match that of regular contract soldiers, but with several supposed guarantees: deployment no closer than 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the front line, and the right to terminate the contract after one year.

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The official promised that after one year of military service, students could return to the school and resume their studies. By then, he said, they would already have received a five-million-ruble ($65,800) signing bonus, along with free tuition.

There was, of course, a catch. To qualify, students have to join up quickly — before the end of January. The urgency, the official explained, was due to the Defense Ministry’s rapid recruitment drive for newly formed drone warfare units. Even women were being accepted, he emphasized.

The website of Siberian Federal University shared a similar recruitment pitch in December. At Belgorod State Technological University, administrators also held meetings with students about what they called “new opportunities.” According to the school, students left those meetings “imbued with a sense of responsibility for the fate of the homeland.” Some even began preparing the necessary paperwork shortly afterward, the school reported.

Students at several Moscow colleges have reported receiving similar offers. Pop-up ads for “special contracts” now appear when users open Bauman Moscow State Technical University’s official app.

At the Higher School of Economics (HSE), administrators circulated an internal memo with specific instructions: beginning immediately, male Russian citizens facing expulsion for poor academic performance were to receive additional information alongside their formal dismissal notices outlining an “alternative option.” That alternative is the same “special contract” for service in Russia’s drone warfare units.

Under the new procedure, a student at risk of expulsion is sent an official letter from the college proposing that he sign the contract, and given three days to decide. During that time, the expulsion process is put on hold.

The terms on offer are broadly the same across institutions: a one-year contract, standard military pay, academic leave, and service limited exclusively to drone units, with no reassignment to other formations.

Get Lost, an organization that assists Russian deserters, told Cherta that colleges have never before been so actively involved in promoting military contracts. So far, the group says, it hasn’t received complaints that students are being directly coerced into signing. Even so, its staff believe school administrations aren’t telling students the full truth about what will actually happen if they join up.

The fine print

Military lawyers doubt that students who sign a “special contract” will actually be able to leave the army once it expires. Artyom Klyga, a lawyer with the Movement of Conscientious Objectors, points out that soldiers who previously signed one- or three-year contracts are now serving indefinitely under Russia’s mobilization decree, which makes termination impossible. It’s therefore unclear, he says, why contracts for drone warfare units would be any different.

Under current Russian law, Klyga notes, there is only one type of service agreement that can genuinely be limited to a year: a contract with a volunteer formation. “Not in the sense that someone went to the front of their own free will,” he explains, “but in the sense that they signed a contract to serve in a volunteer unit.” That distinction is clearly spelled out in Russia’s defense legislation, which treats contract soldiers and volunteers as separate legal categories.

Klyga sent a request to HSE asking it to clarify what kind of contract it was offering students. The school replied that it was standard contract military service — not service in a volunteer formation.

The payments promised to students reinforce that conclusion. They match the compensation guaranteed by law to regular contract soldiers, not volunteers. The one-time signing bonus, for example, totals 2.3 million rubles (over $30,000): 400,000 rubles ($5,300) from the Defense Ministry and 1.9 million rubles ($25,000) from the Moscow city government. Compensation for injury or death is likewise calculated under the rules for soldiers contracted by the Defense Ministry.

For that reason, Klyga anticipates that when a student submits a request for discharge after a year of service, they’ll likely be told that their contract has been “extended until the mobilization decree is lifted.” That’s already the reality for tens of thousands of Russian service members. “There will be no way to go back to college,” he says. “Everyone will point to our extremely convoluted military legislation and say that you’re the idiot.”

According to Klyga, there are no legal guarantees that students will actually be able to return from the front after a year. “Under the guise of a ‘special contract,’ what’s really happening is straightforward recruitment for the war across federal universities,” he argues.

Get Lost staff also said that there’s no real option to leave the army after a year. “There are no contracts other than the Defense Ministry contract,” the group says. “We’ve heard these stories a thousand times: ‘It’s not the Defense Ministry, it’s some private military company, or a BARS unit, or another organization supposedly combatting drones.’ It always ends the same way. There is one standard contract, it renews automatically, and it cannot be terminated. Period. There are no variations.”

At the same time, Klyga notes, universities bear no legal responsibility for distributing incomplete or misleading information about army contracts, since these offers are not covered by consumer protection law. What is illegal, he stresses, are threats of expulsion for refusing to sign.