Russia presses college students to fill ranks of drone pilots

Students at one of Russia’s leading engineering universities are getting a lucrative offer: ditch their studies for a year, fly drones for the military and earn more than 5 million rubles ($68,275) in pay as well as free tuition on their return.

Pamphlets distributed at Bauman Moscow State Technical University promise students who sign up for the unmanned systems forces will fly drones from far behind the front lines, but still qualify for combat veteran status.

It’s part of a broader push across Russia to recruit university and college students, using lavish signing bonuses, academic leave and even outright coercion to convince young men to join the fight. At least 270 institutions are actively promoting military contracts, according to the independent magazine Groza, which specialises in higher education and student issues.

"Universities have turned into recruitment hubs," said Ivan Chuvilyaev, who works with the Idite Lesom (Get Lost) project that provides assistance to Russians avoiding conscription or leaving the country. “The primary reason for many boys to go to university — the draft deferment — no longer works.”

The campaign underscores how the Kremlin is adapting to sustain its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, now in its fifth year. The military is trying to tap a population once largely shielded from frontline recruitment as earlier pipelines that targeted prisoners may be close to exhaustion. At the same time, the Kremlin’s forces are suffering heavy losses on the battlefield, making recruitment of new soldiers all the more urgent.

With more than 2 million men in Russian higher education, universities offer a huge pool of young, trainable recruits — many with the technical skills suited to the military’s reported plan for a significant expansion of the unmanned forces, the role of which has grown in importance as the conflict has evolved. Yet, it risks wagering young lives as well as future talent that could one day steer the country.

Chuvilyaev said Idite Lesom has received more than a hundred requests for help from parents and students from dozens of universities across the country. He said that students were being gathered in assembly halls and mandatory meetings to hear sales pitches to join up.

The universities and colleges are the ones running the campaigns, and their administrators sometimes act as the public face for them. The rector of the Moscow State Academy of Law made a show of escorting several students as they signed up, lauding their “brave, worthy and responsible act.”

The Moscow State Academy of Law and Plekhanov Russian University of Economics in Moscow have also both formed their own detachments for potential student recruits.

Representatives of Moscow State Academy of Law and Plekhanov University didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Promotional materials at St. Petersburg State Medical University say priority is given to “e-sportsmen, drone pilots, gamers and programmers,” with offers of as much as 3.4 million rubles — a sum that dwarfs average wages in Russia. The Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok confirmed in a statement to local media that it offers academic leave for the duration of military service and free tuition and accommodation upon return.

Other universities have advertised tax holidays, loan forgiveness of as much as 10 million rubles and even a free plot of land in promotions on their official websites.

Recruiters portray the unmanned systems forces units as safer and distant from the brutal “meat grinder” service in the infantry, but students, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information, say the pitch is sometimes backed by threats from universities about their academic standing if they refuse.

Several students described threats of expulsion at their institutions, while a college director at the Kazan Innovative University told a group of students that they had already been expelled, and the only way back was to talk to military recruiters, according to videos posted by Groza on Telegram.

Kazan Innovative University didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“We’ve never received so many appeals from students,” said Polina Usoltseva, editor of Groza, who left Russia after the war began. “There are hundreds of them, and they only express hopelessness and despair.”

Russian officials deny students are being pressured. A Defense Ministry official said last month that students sign on voluntarily and aren’t forced into contracts. The Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education on the same day denied reports of student expulsions to coerce them into signing service contracts, the Interfax news agency reported.

Although recruiters advertise one-year stints, lawyers say that can be misleading and it could be harder to get out of the military under Russia’s current wartime legal framework. Contracts can’t be terminated until the Special Military Operation ends, said Artem Klyga, a lawyer who has been based in Germany since leaving Russia after the 2022 partial call-up, using the Kremlin’s term for describing the war.

Once signed up, the military could also transfer a recruit to other branches, including to the trenches as foot soldiers, Klyga said.

The BBC reported earlier this month the first known death of a student recruit in the war, which happened in April, just three months into his service.

Still, it’s not clear the campaign is producing many volunteers.

In the Sverdlovsk region, only 21 students have agreed to sign a contract for military service over the past five months, Dmitry Demenkov, head of the Yekaterinburg recruitment centre, told local television last month. Most of those were from technical schools and colleges, as there are practically no university student volunteers, he said.