A drone factory in Russia is running ads featuring teens who say they earn thousands assembling Shahed drones
In Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan, the Alabuga Special Economic Zone and its Alabuga Polytechnic vocational school have launched an ad campaign featuring teenagers who describe how they earn money assembling Shahed kamikaze drones.
Journalists at the independent science-focused outlet T-invariant obtained a 6.49-gigabyte archive of promotional videos titled “AP Boats.” (For several years now, the term “boats” has been used in Alabuga when referring to drone production.) According to the outlet, the archive contains dozens of clips of students explaining how they combine their studies with work assembling drones. The teens say they begin earning 150,000 rubles ($1,900) per month in their second year and 350,000 rubles ($4,450) by their third.
“My name is Darina. I’m 16 years old. Next year, I’ll be earning 150,000 rubles a month. I study at Alabuga Polytechnic and work at the world’s largest drone manufacturing plant. My parents are proud of me. Want to do the same?” one student says in a video.
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Another student says his parents “didn’t understand” his decision to assemble drones, but that he took the job because he is “a patriot.”
Other students also say they are “helping their country” and that their parents are proud of them. One clip featuring a third-year student ends with the line: “My parents told me: ‘You’re a real man.’”
“Over the past year, agencies have approached me with this about once a quarter, but this is the first time they’ve brought videos like these,” one blogger told T-invariant. “I’d estimate they’re spending tens of millions of rubles on a single campaign.”
According to him, posting a 25-second ad can cost between 250,000 and 1.5 million rubles ($3,200 and $19,000), depending on a blog’s audience size and reach.
The student-fronted ads have already been published by the pro-war Telegram channel Rybar (with more than 1.5 million subscribers) and the Telegram channel of the Russian imageboard Dvach (920,000 subscribers).
Alabuga Polytechnic released similar advertisements in 2023, but the new videos are more aggressive and more direct, T-invariant notes.
In July 2023, the media outlet Protocol and the YouTube channel RZVRT reported that Alabuga students had been assigned to assemble Iranian attack drones used by Russia in its war against Ukraine. Students said they couldn’t refuse to work on drone assembly and were forbidden from talking about it. In 2024, the college dormitory was struck by Ukrainian drones.