WASHINGTON — They were promised a chance to earn money, get an education abroad, and gain work experience. Instead, they found themselves assembling military drones in Russia and, in one case, subjected to a Ukrainian drone strike.

A series of investigative reports has shed light on a Russian labor recruitment program that has allegedly lured young African women to work at an industrial park in provincial Russia with false promises and coerced them into contributing to the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine.

The reported victims of the program, which attracts recruits largely through online job advertisements, includes women from Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria.

Media reports from The Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and others have exposed the operation, entitled Alabuga Start, but VOA reporting has found that African countries have largely failed to intervene or give an official response. Some even appear to be building ties with the Russian entity behind the program.

That entity called the Alabuga Special Economic Zone, has been intensifying its outreach across the African continent, according to David Albright, founder of the Institute for Science and International Security and the researcher behind a report exposing the program that exploited the young women. “In some of the initial investigations of this, the recruiters in Africa were oblivious when they were asked where these women were going,” Albright said, adding that some are now aware and that he hopes there will be “pushback from these governments about what exactly [Alabuga is] recruiting these women to do.”

Albright said representatives from Alabuga recently visited Sierra Leone, Zambia and Madagascar, signing memorandums of cooperation with local organizations, despite the reports of misleading recruitment practices and questionable labor actions.

Albright said the young women are forced to handle toxic materials, which he says is forbidden in Russian labor law. But African and other governments have also been willing to send their citizens off to Alabuga Start. VOA discovered a series of documents online indicating the government ministries had officially promoted the program.

VOA reached out to authorities of Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and Nigeria but several emails and phone calls went unanswered. VOA also requested comment from Alabuga and the Russian Embassy in Washington but received no response.

Recruitment under false pretenses

Located 1,000 kilometers to the east of Moscow in Russia’s Tatarstan region, the city of Yelabuga, known as Alabuga in the local Tatar language, would hardly seem a desirable location for young people from Africa.

But the nearby Alabuga Special Economic Zone has been casting a wide net on the African continent. In promotional materials, it paints an exciting, optimistic picture of life in the Alabuga Start program.

In one recruitment video intended to appeal to potential recruits, an African woman arrives in Alabuga and begins work at a restaurant, where she waits on a young Russian man. At the end of the video, she returns to the restaurant as his pregnant wife.

Other promotional videos show participants working in construction, cleaning and warehouse operations, as well as studying and playing sports with their friends. Only one video features the women assembling drones, but no indication is given that the drones have a military purpose.

According to the Russian independent news outlet Protokol, the program has specifically targeted young women because its organizers believe young men from Africa “could be too aggressive and dangerous.”

Researchers and reporters found that some of the program’s internal documents, as reported by Albright and others, often referred to the women as mulattos using an outdated racial term that is now widely considered offensive.

Its appeal to African young people is not difficult to understand, says Maxim Matusevich, a Russia-Africa expert and a global history professor at Seton Hall University.

“A lot of these nations have very high unemployment rates,” he told VOA. Russia is “offering them attractively packaged and attractively sold job packages.”

Matusevich believes Alabuga Start aims to solve the problem of a shortfall of workers in Russia due to the heavy demand of the war in Ukraine.

Albright said that inaction has global ramifications: Alabuga Start is involving young Africans in Russian violence against Ukrainians.

“It’s been a very deceptive program in the sense that the applicants didn’t know they’d be working in essentially a U.S.- [and] European-sanctioned company making drones that are being used to devastating effect against Ukrainian civil targets, energy targets, electrical plants,” he told VOA.

“And so, in that sense, they’re complicit in a crime, an international crime, given that the war against Ukraine is illegal. They’re getting involved in making drones that are being used against civilian targets, not just military targets.”

Exploitation factory

Alabuga didn’t start out exploiting young African women. Before that, it used young Russians in drone production.

Since 2019, the special economic zone has operated a program called Alabuga Polytech, which recruits Russian high school students. Unlike workers from the African continent and other countries, the Russian students take part in a four-year work-study program, receiving accredited technical education while doing industrial work.

After Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, that program ramped up its activity. It hasn’t been entirely smooth sailing. When the program pivoted to drone production, Alabuga had to lobby the Russian authorities to alter labor laws. According to a July report from the Institute for Science and International Security, that allowed Alabuga to hire children under the age of 18 to work with toxic chemicals.

Parents soon began to complain about the poor work conditions: Participants were working 12-hour factory shifts and their movements were strictly controlled, Albright recounted. He said the program has since stopped recruiting people younger than 18.

When the special economic zone launched Alabuga Start and began recruiting workers from abroad in 2022, the program was almost entirely focused on drone production.

According to estimates by Albright’s organization, only a third of Polytech students work on drone production, while over 90% of Alabuga Start participants do.

Despite that stark distinction, organizers appear to have frequently conflated the two programs, including by sometimes depicting Alabuga Start participants wearing school uniforms in promotional materials.

Multinational conveyer belt

Alabuga’s recent outreach to African nations signals a potential expansion of its recruitment efforts.

VOA found that African and other governments have at times been willing partners. Nigeria’s Federal Ministry of Education shared on its website a document announcing open admissions to Alabuga Start in 2023.

Uganda’s Ministry of Education and Sport shared a similar announcement. In the document upload site Scribd, a digital document library, VOA found two files that appear to be official letters from the government ministries of Mali and Burkina Faso announcing that Alabuga Start had reserved spots for participants from those countries in 2023.

VOA also found a document by Bangladesh’s Bureau of Manpower Employment and Training announcing that applications were open for Alabuga Start in 2023.

The special economic zone’s many meetings with African diplomats and government officials, some of which included the signing of memoranda of understanding, appear to signal a deepening of ties.

Albright emphasizes that the special economic zone’s drone factory has been a linchpin of Russian-Iranian collaboration during the war against Ukraine.

“Alabuga is a special economic zone that basically builds and hires out or sells buildings for civilian industry,” he said. “With the war in Ukraine, their international occupants pulled out and they were desperate for money. And so, they made a contract with the Russian government and the Iranian government to build drones.”

The Alabuga factory in question primarily assembled the Shahed-136, an Iranian kamikaze drone.

In the first half of 2023, around 100 Alabuga Polytech students traveled to Tehran for two months of training in Shahed-136 airframe production, The Washington Post reported in August 2023.

Alabuga Start participants are largely used as low-skilled labor, assigned to complete the simplest tasks involved in assembling the airframes. A list of 100 Russian words that participants must know to take part in the program drives that conclusion home. It largely consists of basic vocabulary but also includes several higher-level words: “to hook,” “to unhook,” “factory,” and “task.”

The military nature of the work is largely absent from promotional materials for the program viewed by VOA. They typically show participants working in the service industry, construction, or non-military industrial production.

One brochure emphasizes that, after completing Alabuga Start, participants have the opportunity to continue working on a permanent basis, get a job at another Alabuga factory, or enroll in Polytech.

It also includes images that appear to show articles by the Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal with headlines praising the factory and its salaries. In reality, the images have been edited to conceal the fact that both stories are about military drone production at the facility.

That work has placed African women in direct danger. On April 22, a Ukrainian drone crashed into the dormitory where Alabuga Start participants live.

A day later, Alabuga Start released a video featuring a Kenyan woman –– one of the program’s public-facing participants –– who said she would be going to work in a cafe. The participant notably said she had come to work and study at Alabuga Polytech — and not Start.

“Those who attacked our hostel today are real barbarians and they deserve serious condemnation,” she said. “In my opinion, they wanted to intimidate us. But I want to tell you they did not succeed. You won’t scare me, because Alabuga is a strong place and we will get through this.”

This story is a collaboration between VOA’s Africa Division and VOA’s Russian Service.
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