Since August 2022, Shahed-136 drones have become one of the main weapons in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Originally supplied by Iran, these low-cost “kamikaze” drones have been repurposed by Russians in massive numbers to terrorize Ukrainian cities and destroy energy infrastructure.
As Moscow’s reliance on kamikaze drones grew, it faced a new challenge—labor shortages inside its own military-industrial complex for their production.
To solve that, Russia found a disturbing solution: using foreign women, primarily from Africa, as forced labor under the guise of educational and employment programs.
A Channel 24 investigation has revealed how the Alabuga Start program in Tatarstan became a front for recruiting young women from Africa and Asia to assemble Shahed drones inside Russia.
Alabuga: The “Economic Zone” Turned War Factory
The Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan was originally created to attract high-tech investment and foreign manufacturing. Today, it is a cornerstone of Russia’s network for producing war drones.
Two flagship programs—Alabuga Polytechnic and Alabuga Start—supply the human capital for this operation. The first uses Russian students who are compelled to work on drone assembly lines under military-style discipline. The second, more insidious one, targets foreign women aged 18 to 22, lured by promises of education, stipends, and “career growth.”
Behind the Kremlin’s glossy advertising videos and social media campaigns lies a system of exploitation designed to provide cheap, expendable labor for Russia’s military economy.
How Recruitment Works: TikTok, Tinder, and “Business Cats”
The Alabuga Start program operates with the sophistication of a private recruitment agency—and the resources of a state intelligence operation. Russia uses:
- TikTok ads and Telegram bots to reach young women in Africa and Central Asia;
- Tinder and influencer marketing to present the program as an adventure abroad;
- Diplomatic channels, including Russian embassies and the Rossotrudnichestvo network (“Russian Houses”), to legitimize the initiative.
Applicants are told to fill out forms online, complete a bizarre recruitment “game” called Business Cats, and attend an online interview. The software behind this game was created by Satvaspace, a Russian company linked to an Estonian-registered subsidiary, SATVA.DEV, which lists major international clients like Pfizer—without disclosing its role in recruiting workers for Russia’s war drone industry.
Women who “pass” the selection process receive expedited visas and are flown to Tatarstan, where slave-like conditions await them: chemical exposure, lack of protective gear, and 12-hour assembly shifts, according to media reports.
Africans Say They Were Duped into Building Drones for Use in Ukraine
An African woman who had been lured to Tatarstan told DW how African women were forced to make drones. Chinara, a young Nigerian woman who took part in the Alabuga program and left Russia disappointed, said in an online interview via social messaging that it appeared to be “a hard labor with low wage.”
Interpol is investigating a professional training program for African women linked to a Russian drone manufacturer, Bloomberg reported, citing the head of Interpol’s Botswana bureau.
In October 2024, The Associated Press reported that women from Africa, mainly Central and East African countries, were recruited via social media networks to work in a factory in Russia assembling drones to be launched in Ukraine
In interviews with the AP, some of the African women working in Alabuga complained of long hours under constant surveillance, of broken promises about wages, and of working with caustic chemicals that left their skin pockmarked and itching.
Diplomacy as Cover
Russia disguises this labor exploitation under the banner of “international cooperation.”
In July 2023, at the Russia–Africa Economic and Humanitarian Forum in St. Petersburg, representatives from Alabuga Start held meetings with African officials, including those from Burkina Faso and Nigeria. They signed memoranda on “educational exchange” and “youth development.”
In reality, these partnerships serve as channels for human recruitment. When Nigeria’s ambassador to Russia, Professor Abdullahi Y. Shehu, visited Alabuga, he was shown “training facilities” and “classrooms”—which”, according to insiders, are drone assembly lines.
Through these diplomatic relationships, the Kremlin presents forced labor as cooperation and industrial militarization as education.
The System Behind the Scheme
Investigations by activists from Eris Nexus and the website AlabugaTruth have begun to expose the recruiters behind the program. Three officials—Elmir Saifullin, Konstantin Trifonov, and Anastasia Barysheva—are reportedly responsible for coordinating new international partnerships and candidate selection.
Barysheva, one of the most visible faces of Alabuga Start, even gained notoriety in Western media for racist comments about African participants, calling them “smelly” and “lazy.” Her statements, published by the Daily Mail, reveal the toxic, colonial mindset underpinning Russia’s “international programs.”
While Moscow markets Alabuga Start as an opportunity for “global friendship,” it functions more like a 21st-century slave trade—fueled by desperation, propaganda, and state power.
A Weaponized Workforce
The exploitation of migrant women in military production has multiple functions for the Kremlin:
- Economic – providing low-cost, unregulated labor for drone factories.
- Propagandistic—framing Russia as a “global education leader” that offers opportunities to the Global South.
- Strategic – building loyalty networks across Africa and Asia while undermining Western partnerships.
By embedding this system within diplomatic and humanitarian frameworks, Moscow launders militarization through development language. The women who assemble Shahed war drones unknowingly become part of a hybrid war machine—victims of Russia’s deception, yet also potential witnesses or accomplices in war crimes.
Potential Accomplices in Russian War Crimes in Ukraine
Russia is not only at war with Ukraine. It is at war with international law, against basic human rights, and against the norms of the civilized world. Every girl who falls into Alabuga Start’s trap serves as evidence that Russian development and cooperation programs conceal slavery, exploitation, and war.
Ukraine documents Russian crimes. In particular, Ukraine’s law enforcement agencies qualify Russian shelling of Ukrainian civilian infrastructure as war crimes and investigate them under Art. 438 of the Criminal Code. That is, migrant workers from Africa in Russia are potential accomplices in Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
The Kremlin uses foreign women not only as cheap labor but also as “human shields,” because they, in particular, become legitimate targets. When Ukrainian drones or missiles hit Russian military facilities, migrant workers who are forced to work there become victims of the Russian war.
Russia’s Hybrid Expansion in the Global South
The Alabuga Start revelations expose a much larger pattern. As the West isolates Moscow over its war aggression in Ukraine, Russia has intensified its outreach in Africa and the Global South, using education, employment, and infrastructure as soft-power camouflage.
Just as Wagner Group operations combined military contracts with resource exploitation, Alabuga Start merges diplomacy, disinformation, and forced labor into one hybrid instrument of influence.
This is not merely about filling assembly lines—it is about building ideological and logistical dependency. Each “student” recruited under the pretense of opportunity becomes another node in Russia’s campaign to reposition itself as a patron of the developing world while waging a colonial war in Europe.
In the end, Alabuga is not just a war drone factory. It is a symbol of Russia’s global strategy: the fusion of propaganda, coercion, and colonial exploitation—all in service of sustaining its war machine.