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Russian Students Recruited as Drone Operators Reassigned to Frontline Infantry Assaults
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Young Russian students who signed specialized military contracts to serve as drone operators are being reclassified as regular infantrymen and deployed into direct frontline assaults.
Recruiters have targets among university and technical students, promising them technical training and safe positions away from active combat zones, based on data from Militarnyi on June 22.
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The Ukrainian project “I Want to Live” has already identified and published tracking lists containing 1,059 and 262 contracted students. According to Russian legal specialist Sergey Mamontov, these recruits are kept in the dark about how their contracts legally convert them into standard service personnel subject to any commander's reassignment.
"But the UAV operator service is a dangerous high-tech assignment. According to available data, around one thousand UAV operators have already died since the beginning of the war. And the mortality rate of UAV operators is comparable to that of artillerymen," Mamontov stated.
He noted that multiple families have reached out after their children were promised drone specialist training but were sent directly to training grounds and subsequent frontline assault units instead.
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Journalists verified the first known casualty from this specific recruitment practice in May. Valeriy Averin, a 23-year-old student from Buryatia, signed a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense in January during his final year at the Buryat Republican Technical School of Construction and Industrial Technologies. After completing drone pilot training, he was sent to the front and died in the Luhansk region on April 6, just days after deployment.
His adoptive mother, Afanasyeva, stated that her son called her for the last time on April 2 to inform her he was moving to an area without communication options. Six days later, she received official notification of his death during a mortar strike.
"The child studied for three months to be a UAV operator, and they put him in an assault, in the very meat grinder. Someone who had not served in the army," Afanasyeva said.
Previously, a Russian lawmaker proposed mandatory military training for children starting in the fifth grade to prepare eleven-year-olds for a potential confrontation with NATO and the European Union by 2030.
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