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Alabuga Polytech and the Alabuga Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in Russia’s Tatarstan have launched a large-scale advertising campaign to recruit more students to assemble Iranian-designed Shahed attack drones, which are widely used by the Russian military in the invasion of Ukraine. The independent science-focused outlet T-invariant obtained nearly 6.5 gigabytes of promotional videos in which underage students openly discuss their work assembling drones. For the first time in Alabuga-related promotional materials, the production of combat drones is explicitly mentioned, and workshops responsible for churning out the distinctive black UAVs are shown.
In the videos, students in different grades describe the working conditions and salaries, saying second-year students can earn 150,000 rubles a month ($1,900), and third-year students 350,000 ($4,500) — significantly higher than the 87,000 ruble ($1,100) median monthly salary in the region. In one video, 16-year-old first-year student Darina says that next year she will begin earning money assembling drones, adding that her parents are proud of her. In another video, second-year student Alexander says he is already earning 150,000 rubles working as an incoming inspection specialist at the “largest drone production plant in the world.” One young man in a video says that after he started working in drone production, his father started calling him “a real man.”
The video archive is labeled “Lodki” (lit. “Boats”), which is the code name Alabuga has used for several years for combat drone production, as previously noted by open source intelligence (OSINT) researchers.
The Insider was able to confirm that at least some of the teenagers featured in the promotional videos do in fact study at Alabuga Polytech and came there from different regions of the country. Among them are students from the cities of Nizhnekamsk and Naberezhnye Chelny, as well as a village in Tatarstan’s Bugulma District, while one is from Moscow.
It is also reported that an advertising agency offered bloggers paid integrations using these videos. According to one blogger, companies looking to post a 25-second advertisement in this format must pay influencers between 250,000 ($3,200) and 1.5 million rubles ($19,000), depending on the size of the channel’s audience. The blogger also said such offers typically come once every few months, but that this is the first time a potential advertiser has specifically made mention of Shahed drone production. By his estimate, tens of millions of rubles are usually spent on a campaign of this kind. One promotional post using these videos has already appeared on the pro-war “Rybar” channel, which has an audience of more than 1.5 million subscribers.
The Alabuga SEZ and its affiliated technical college came under Western sanctions in 2024. Reports have previously detailed that living conditions for teenagers at the school resembled a “fascist order,” and that cases of suicide had been recorded.
In August 2025, reports confirmed that Russia had expanded recruitment of South African women to work on the production of Shahed-136 drones in Alabuga. The country’s Ministry for Women later issued a statement warning its citizens about the dangers of social media posts promoting job opportunities in Russia.
The Alabuga facility has come under attack by Ukrainian drones in April 2024 and in June 2025.