Russia is increasingly recruiting African women to produce drones, investigation finds

The social media ads promised a free plane ticket, money and a faraway adventure in Europe. All you needed to do, it said, was finish a computer game and complete a 100-word Russian vocabulary test.

But for some of the young African women who answered the ad, it was only when they arrived on the steppes of Russia’s Tatarstan region that they discovered what they would really be doing: toiling in a factory to make weapons of war, assembling thousands of Iranian-designed attack drones to be launched into Ukraine.

In interviews with AP, some of the women complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages and areas of study, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching.

As it tries to offset an urgent domestic labour shortage, the Kremlin has been recruiting young women workers from countries like Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone and Nigeria, as well as Sri Lanka. The effort is now expanding across Asia and into Latin America.

According to AP’s investigation, this online recruitment drive — dubbed “Alabuga Start” — has put some of Russia’s vital weapons production lines in the inexperienced hands of about 200 African women.

They are working alongside Russian vocational students as young as 16 in a plant in Tatarstan’s Alabuga Special Economic Zone, about 1,000 kilometres east of Moscow.

Into the trap

One woman who had abandoned a job at home and took the Russian offer summed it up bluntly: “I don’t really know how to make drones.”

She had excitedly documented her journey to Russia, taking selfies at the airport and shooting video of her airline meal and of the in-flight map, focusing on the word “Europe”.

When she arrived in Alabuga, however, she soon learned what she would be doing and realised it had all been “a trap”.

“The company is all about making drones. Nothing else,” she said. “I regret and I curse the day I started making all those things.”

One possible clue about what was in store for the applicants was their vocabulary test that included words like “factory” and the verbs “hook” and “unhook”.

Workers found themselves under constant surveillance; hours were long, and the pay was lower than expected.

Factory management apparently tries to discourage them from leaving, and although some reportedly have left or found work elsewhere in Russia, this could not be independently verified.

A drone factory grows

After President Vladimir Putin launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russia and Iran signed a €1.5 billion military supply deal, and Moscow began using Iranian drones in battle later that year.

The Shahed-136 unites were first shipped to Russia in disassembled form, but production has shifted to Alabuga and possibly another factory.

The Alabuga plant is now Russia’s main plant for making the one-way kamikaze drones, and it plans to produce 6,000 of them a year by 2025, according to leaked documents and the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security.

That target is now ahead of schedule, with Alabuga building 4,500, said David Albright, a former UN weapons inspector who works at the institute.

Finding workers to meet this high target was a problem. With unemployment at record lows and many Russians either already working in military industries, fighting in Ukraine or fleeing the country, plant officials have turned vocational students and cheap foreign workers.

According to Albright, around 90% of the foreign women recruited via the Alabuga Start programme work on making drones, particularly on parts that require little skill.

Documents leaked last year and verified by Albright and another drone expert show that the plant’s workforce, which was just under 900-strong in 2023, is planned to grow to more than 2,600 in 2025.

TikTok games

In the first half of this year, 182 women were recruited, largely from Central and East African countries, according to a Facebook page promoting the Alabuga Start programme. It also recruits in South America and Asia “to help ladies to start their career.”

The Alabuga Start programme has been promoted by education ministries in Uganda and Ethiopia as a way to make money and learn new skills.

Officials held recruiting events in Uganda, and tried to recruit from its orphanages, according to messages on Alabuga’s Telegram channel. Russian officials have also visited more than 26 embassies in Moscow to push the programme.

Initially advertised as a work-study program, Alabuga Start has become more explicit about what it offers foreigners, insisting on newer posts that “is NOT an educational programme” — though one post still shows young women in school uniforms.

When Sierra Leone Ambassador Mohamed Yongawo visited in May and met with five participants from his country, he appeared to believe it was a study program.

“It would be great if we had 30 students from Sierra Leone studying at Alabuga,” he said afterwards.

The recruitment drive relies on a robust social media campaign of slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women visiting Tatarstan’s cultural sites or playing sports.

The videos show them working — smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.

Alabuga’s social media feeds don’t mention the plant’s role at the heart of Russian drone production, and are filled with comments from Africans begging for work. Many say they have applied but are yet to receive an answer.

Last month, the Alabuga Start social media site said it was “excited to announce that our audience has grown significantly”.

That could be due to its hiring of influencers, including Bassie, a South African with almost 800,000 TikTok and Instagram followers.

From the air

With the help of these foreign recruits, Russia has vastly grown its fleet of Iranian-designed Shahed drones.

Albright’s organisation said that while nearly 4,000 were launched at Ukraine from the start of the war in February 2022 through 2023, the first seven months of this year alone saw Russia launch nearly twice that number.

But while the Alabuga plant’s production line is running ahead of schedule, there are questions about the quality of the drones and whether manufacturing problems are causing malfunctions.

An AP analysis of about 2,000 Shahed attacks documented by Ukraine’s military since July 29 showed that about 95% of the drones did not hit discernible targets. Instead, they fell into rivers and fields, strayed into NATO member Latvia, or came down in Russia or Belarus.

The high failure rate could be due to improvements in Ukrainian air defences, although Albright said it also could be because of poor craftsmanship among the low-skilled workforce.

Russia is also deploying a Shahed variant that doesn’t carry an explosive warhead, perhaps in an effort to overwhelm Ukrainian air defence by forcing them to attack what are in fact dummy drones.

Burned and surveilled

The foreign workers travel by bus from their living quarters to the factory, passing multiple security checkpoints after a license plate scan, while other vehicles are stopped for more stringent checks, according to the woman who assembles drones.

They share dormitories and kitchens that are “guarded around the clock,” social media posts say. Entry is controlled via facial recognition, and recruits are watched on surveillance cameras. Pets, alcohol and drugs are not allowed.

The foreigners receive local SIM cards for their phones upon arrival but are forbidden from bringing them into the factory, which is considered a sensitive military site.

One woman said she could only talk to an AP reporter with her manager’s permission, another said her messages are monitored, a third said workers are told not to talk to outsiders about their work, and a fourth said managers encouraged them to inform on co-workers.

The airframe worker told AP the recruits are taught how to assemble the drones and coat them with a caustic substance with the consistency of yogurt.

Many workers lack protective gear, she said, adding that the chemicals made her face feel like it was being pricked with tiny needles, and “small holes” appeared on her cheeks, making them itch severely.

“My God, I could scratch myself. I could never get tired of scratching myself,” she said. “A lot of girls are suffering.”