Russia: African Girls brought to Tatarstan to Build Drones

Written on 27 July 2025.

Lured by promises of high pay, European travel, education, and the possibility of “finding love,” African 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 they are 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.

The Russian military company JSC Alabuga dealt with an acute labor shortage to build Shahed 136 drones (for the Ukraine war) by raising salaries and exploiting high school-age students and immigrant employees recruited under false pretenses.  JSC Alabuga has been using two programs to actively recruit young men and women, primarily aged 16-22, to make military drones: Alabuga Polytechnic is used to recruit students within Russia, and the Alabuga Start program is used to recruit workers from the Commonwealth of Independent States (also known as CIS countries) and other countries, primarily African countries. 

This deceptive and manipulative recruitment effort is intended primarily to enable JSC Alabuga to meet its ambitious Shahed 136 kamikaze drone production goals for the Russian military, a project that Russia steeps in secrecy, to the point of calling it motorboat manufacturing.  Potential recruits are not told that they could be involved in producing Shahed 136 drones

Alabuga Polytechnic’s students and Alabuga Start’s recruits have produced thousands of Shahed drones and dozens, perhaps hundreds of Albatross M5 drones for Russian combat operations against Ukraine,

Aware of the Russian legal problems of hiring workers under 18 years old, defined as children by the United Nations, JSC Alabuga lobbied Russian authorities to change labor laws to allow minors under 18 to work in riskier work environments, which includes Alabuga because of the use of toxic chemicals in making the airframe and the danger of explosions from fuel and high explosives.

The Wall Street Journal reported since its inception that over one thousand women from all over Africa went to Alabuga under Alabuga Start, and another thousand are likely to go this year, based on Ugandan officials aiding or knowledgeable about the recruitment effort. At least twenty-seven countries have sent participants through Alabuga Start to work at Alabuga, most are in Africa, but also seven are in Commonwealth of Independent State countries

Alabuga Start uses several tactics to attract foreign females to join its program. It offers a generous pay of 60,000₽ per month ($673 USD) and a certificate of professional training such as in “Quality Management of Products, Processes and Services” from the technological college Kazan National Research Technical University The participants are not formal students at the technical college and are only listed on the school’s roster to obtain a professional training certificate.

Alabuga Start notes that the salary it offers is at least double the average monthly salary in countries such as: Zimbabwe, Uganda, Democratic Republic of Congo, Senegal, and Rwanda. The program even goes as far to claim through videos and advertisements that Alabuga Start participants can “find love” and start families in Russia, and that the Alabuga Polytech offers a great way to do that.

As mentioned earlier, more than an estimated 90 percent of them work in drone production. In some leaked documents from 2023, they were called "mulattoes," a term referring to people of mixed race but apparently used here in a derogatory manner. The modules where they worked were labelled with an additional “M,” or “MM, for “mulatto module.”

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