A university at the center of Russia’s Shahed killer drone manufacturing is offering an education/practical experience package to Ukrainian teenagers that would put them to work building more kamikaze robot aircraft to attack the country they were born in.
Promotional materials published by the major technical university Alabuga Polytech in Russia’s upper Volga Republic of Tatarstan are specifically targeting applicants aged 15 to 21 from occupied portions of Ukraine’s Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, and Crimea regions.
The university offers a four-year program combining a half-day classroom study and half-day factory employment at state-run industries in Alabuga’s special economic zone, Kyiv Post review of those materials found.
The Kremlin, in 2023, bought a prefabricated Shahed drone factory from Iran, set it up in Alabuga, and has since then tripled the facility’s size, turning the plant into, by far, Russia’s highest-capacity drone production site.
Leaked employee rolls show that the robot aircraft mass manufacturing operation employs as many as 10,000 workers. Production lines reportedly operate 24/7 with 2,500 to 2,600 workers per shift.
The state-owned Alabuga Polytechnic is the main training institution for new workers employed by the Russian company manufacturing Iran-licensed drones, JSC Alabuga, and associated production facilities. According to a June report by the independent Russian news agency Astra, the Russian government is expanding military output around Alabuga and is constructing housing for 41,000 new workers.
The university pitch to prospective students promises consideration to applicants from age 15 up to 21, with the only requirement being a certificate of having completed 9th to 11th grades.
A high school diploma, or the equivalent, is desirable but not required, and, even with an academic year starting in late August, recruitment is possible through September, the university application site said.
The work-study program offers guaranteed employment at more than 60 Alabuga production facilities, even to first-year students aged 15 (the age of legal adulthood is 18 in both Ukraine and Russia). Degree programs include industrial robotics, welding technologies, web programming, and business informatics, and as a separate specialization category, aeronautics and programming of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), including FPV (first-person-view) drones.
A student could “graduate” after 10 months to take on a lower-skilled job on an assembly line, or after five years receive an advanced degree in engineering or management, the education offer promises.
In stark contrast to most Russian universities, which suffer from chronic underfunding, the Russian state is channeling near-irresistible sums of money into the Alabuga Polytech recruitment program to draw in prospective students.
For all students, the first year of study is free and agreement to study at Alabuga nets a $330 signing bonus.
From the second year, tuition, room and board – all subsidized by the state – are paid by the student out of a guaranteed minimum salary of $83/month, with “average” salaries in the work-study program around $550/month.
Students with one or more years’ job experience under their belts could earn up $1,650/month and from the second year even low-performing students are guaranteed a monthly salary of $1,210 a month – about 20% less than the salary paid to an adult worker doing the same job, Kyiv Post research found.
For Ukrainian national students (most considered by Russia, illegally, as recently created Russian citizens) there are additional incentives: travel costs paid from frontline regions to Tatarstan and guaranteed post-graduate employment.
Elvira Fomina, Alabuga Polytechnic University Director, during a July 22 broadcast of the nationally aired Russian propaganda news program Solovyev Live, said that she believes Russia’s young “people should be given the opportunity to try their hand at a profession as early as age 16....to create projects for young people where they can feel important and see the results of their work,” she said. “Here, students from their first year are involved in production tasks and gain real experience.” Fomina made no direct reference to Alabuga’s biggest high-tech industry: drone manufacturing.
“This is not education,” said Ukrainian official Petro Andryushchenko, director of the Center for the Study of Occupation, in a Monday Telegram comment, “it is a conveyor belt where a child from occupied Kherson oblast is taught to assemble the very weapons that will later be used to attack their own hometown, while being paid a $330 signing bonus for doing so.”
Under the terms of Article 51 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, an occupying power during a war is expressly prohibited from using “pressure or propaganda” aimed at securing voluntary enlistment in its armed or auxiliary forces, or for work by civilians living in occupied territory in war-related industries.
Employment of any person under the age of 18 for any form of work linked to military operation is similarly banned as a definable war crime. The Soviet Union signed the agreement in 1977 and the Russian Federation reiterated its adherence to all Geneva terms in 1992.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands, in March 2023, issued an arrest warrant for Russian leader Vladimir Putin and a subordinate for probable complicity in the forced relocation of at least 19,000 Ukrainian children from occupied Ukraine to Russia.
The Kremlin has said the charges are false and grounded in Western Russophobia. According to Moscow, the Russian state has the right and obligation “to support all Russian children,” including children living in territory invaded by Russia.
Assisted by Iranian technicians, Russia began independent mass production of Shahed-136/Geran-2 drones at Alabuga in July 2023. By May 2026, according to Ukrainian military intelligence, production at the factory had increased to about 170 kamikaze drones a day or 5,000+/month.
As manufacturing has expanded, the JSC Alabuga workforce has grown to include Russian students and foreign workers. Local media has most profiled newly hired female staff from Sierra Leone, Uganda, India, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Ethiopia, and increasingly, from Colombia, Brazil, Venezuela, and Ecuador.
Russia most often attacks Ukraine with large waves of Shahed-136/Geran-2 drones in air raids sometimes numbering as many as 1,000 UAVs.
Targets include almost solely civilian infrastructure, industry, ports and transport networks. Russia claims not to target civilian residences; however, Shahed drones have attacked Ukrainian homes practically every night, for years.
The single most lethal, independently confirmed Shahed drone assault took place on March 2, 2024, when a UAV warhead hit the 6th floor of a 12-story apartment building in the Black Sea port city of Odesa, causing a partial collapse of the building and burying residents.
At least 12 civilians died, among them five children. Eighteen of the structure’s 36 apartments were demolished by blast and the ensuing collapse.
Ukraine’s first retaliatory attack against Alabuga was in early April 2024, with follow-up raids hitting in in late April and twice in June. The second April attack damaged a student dormitory rather than the main production buildings and injured 12 people, among them students.
Strong Russian local air defenses and the long distance from probable Ukrainian launch sites (720 miles/1,200 km) have prevented Ukraine from stopping the plant’s expansion.