Alabuga Polytech, a college in the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Russia’s Tatarstan region, has launched an advertising campaign under the slogan “Complete your military service working with Geran [drones],” according to a report by the independent science-focused publication T-Invariant.
On the program’s landing page, which is tied to the college’s military department, students are invited to complete their one year of mandatory military service in the “Varyag brigade of the Unmanned Systems Forces.” They are also promised a stipend of 305,000 rubles ($4,000) and a diploma under Alabuga Polytech’s dual-education system. The college administration says this format of compulsory service does not require participants to sign a contract with Russia’s Defense Ministry.
According to the program, conscripts will serve either in Russia’s Oryol Region or at the Alabuga Polytech command center. In a Q&A section, the college administration says: “The service is carried out in the interests of the special military operation, but not on the line of contact.”
As noted by T-Invariant, Russian bloggers and pro-war correspondents began advertising the program on April 15. The promotional posts are largely identical: they either show a young man working with a drone or soldiers looking at a screen displaying a battlefield map. In the latter, the “Soviet Union” is shown advancing against “Poland” and the “Third Reich.”
In recent months, Russian universities have stepped up their efforts to recruit students for the war. By early April, nearly 300 higher education institutions across the country had begun advertising military service under a “special contract” for service in drone units. As reported by the Telegram channel Faridaily (run by independent journalist Farida Rustamova), the Russian Ministry of Education instructed universities to send up to 2% of their students to the war.
Students are often offered contracts with promises that their service will be limited to one year. However, human rights advocate Artyom Klyga published a letter from the Defense Ministry in early April clarifying the terms of those contracts. It said unit commanders have the authority and the right to discharge contract soldiers after one year, but are not obliged to do so. In practice, the arrangement still amounts to military service under an open-ended contract, with the risk of participants being sent to the front lines in Ukraine.
