Reports from multiple sources including the Africa Defense Forum (ADF) and the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), Russia is now importing thousands of African girls and young women, some as young as 16, to build Iranian-designed Shahed 136 kamikaze strike drones at its massive arms production facility in Alabuga.
Lured by promises of high pay, European travel, education, and the possibility of “finding love,” the girls are being brought to Tatarstan’s “Special Economic Zone” located about 1000 kilometers (625 miles) east of Moscow. Their passports are then taken away and made to handover their nominal $700 a month salaries to pay for company housing and other necessities. They are then put to work for long hours gluing together the composite suicide drones under toxic fume-filled factory conditions.
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The company which employs the girls is the internationally sanctioned JSC Alabuga. Ordered by the Kremlin in 2023 to sharply ramp up drone production, JSC Alabuga began two programs to procure the necessary workforce – the Alabuga Polytechnic and Alabuga Start programs.
Alabuga Polytechnic is for Russian youth, both male and female, aged 18-22, and operates in conjunction with a nearby technical school of the same name. It offers unskilled, semi-skilled, and skilled work, with some possibility to earn technical degrees and even career advancement. Some of its more promising recruits have travelled to Iran to receive advanced training in Shaheed production.
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Alabuga Start is quite a different matter. It is restricted to girls from third world nations, primarily Africa and former Soviet republics in central Asia. These are restricted to unskilled jobs, with no avenues for advancement. Instead of receiving vocational education, recruits are simply taught about 100 words of Russian, just enough to enable them to follow orders.
Recruitment in Africa is being done both online and through local agents in Benin, Burkina Faso, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
The quota for this year lays down the recruitment of over 8,000 “mulattoes,” as the girls are called in Russia, to do the highly labor-intensive and unhealthy work of gluing together the composite Shahed bodies using toxic chemicals. The Russian “students” from the Alabuga Polytechnic can then wire the airframes up and attach them to Chinese-made engines to complete the drones. Current production rates are about 170 per day, enabling mass bombardment of Ukrainian cities several times per week.
During the recruitment process the girls are not told they are going to be making strike drones. Rather most are told that they will be building drones strictly for civil applications, with some misled by the even wilder lie that are being brought to Russia to be trained as restaurant or hotel workers. As a result of this deception, the girls are lured in without proper warning that they are being delivered into a facility that is sure to be blasted as soon as Ukraine develops the capability to do so.
Criminal Human Trafficking
The Kremlin leadership has long since been identified by the US government as a major practitioner of human trafficking. However, until now it has mostly specialized in procuring pretty Russian blondes for delivery to Arab magnates of other wealthy customers. Importing African slave girls into very racist Russia for use in arms production and possibly other forms of exploitation represents a new chapter in Moscow’s wickedness.
Aside from the fact that the entire enterprise is dedicated to the mass production of weapons used for the terror bombing of civilians, there are a number of additional criminal implications to the Alabuga Start program.
These include massive violation of Russia’s own child labor and industrial safety laws, UN Human Rights conditions (Articles 23, 24, 26, 28), and international bans on human trafficking. The racially stratified – essentially apartheid – nature of the program should also put to rest any delusions that Russia should in any way be seen as a champion of the Global South. Rather it should help make it clear to all that, in the new “multipolar world order” envisioned by Russia, Africans will serve as slaves.
Evil has no bottom.
Dr. Robert Zubrin @robert_zubrin is an American aerospace engineer and author of 12 books, including most recently The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
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