A factory in Russia’s Alabuga special economic zone in Tatarstan, where Shahed-type attack drones are assembled, is using labor from victims of human trafficking, according to a report by Victor Cha of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and Joseph Kim of the George W. Bush Institute.
The authors said the drones are assembled by Russian teenagers, foreign workers from countries of the Global South, and citizens of North Korea.
Ukrainian intelligence estimates that as many as 12,000 North Koreans have been sent to Alabuga. They are paid around $2.50 an hour, with the regime of Kim Jong Un taking between 70% and 90% of their earnings.
Women ages 16 to 22 from Africa, Latin America, and Asia are recruited with promises of service-sector jobs paying salaries starting from $500 a month. After arriving, their passports are confiscated, and about 90% are sent to assemble drones, according to the report.
Students at Alabuga Polytech college are also put to work from the age of 15 under the guise of earning “work experience,” with shifts lasting as long as 12 hours.
The report’s authors write:
“North Korean laborers have their wages confiscated by the state that sent them. This is the definition of forced labor.”
The Alabuga factory is capable of producing more than 5,500 drones a month, according to the report. Ukrainian intelligence estimates that its workforce is planned to expand from about 1,000 people to 40,000.
The authors called on the U.S. Treasury Department to impose sanctions on companies and educational institutions involved in recruitment for the facility and urged Washington to establish a multilateral investigative group through the United Nations. In September, the Multilateral Sanctions Monitoring Team (MSMT), a group made up of the United States and allied countries, reported that as many as 25,000 North Koreans were working in Russian drone production. According to the group, the workers are registered as students in order to circumvent sanctions.
