The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a US think tank that advocates for tighter sanctions on Russia and Iran, published an analysis on Friday 24 April finding that Alabuga Polytech, the technical college attached to Russia's Geran-2 assembly complex, has been recruiting via Telegram for a new unmanned-systems brigade since mid-April, with adverts targeting video gamers1. Factory director Timur Shagivaleev stated the facility now produces nine times its original target, per FDD analysis. Alabuga is the Russian assembly site for the Geran-2, the domestically built derivative of Iran's Shahed-136 loitering munition.
Teenagers as young as fourteen, recruited directly from the ninth grade, assemble Geran-2 airframes at roughly 150,000 roubles (around $2,000) per month; Coda Story documents African workers brought in under the same scheme starting at $550 per month. CNN previously documented 5,700 drones produced January to September 2024; Ukrainian Defence Intelligence puts first-half 2025 output near 18,000. Bundeswehr (German Armed Forces) General Christian Freuding has warned of potential 2,000 Geran-2 launches in a single night, the upper bound the supply chain is now sized against.
The recruitment line is the supply-side companion to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) finding on US chip dependence. CSIS reported that 69% of the memory hardware and 57% of the processors in Russia's AI-enabled drones came from US firms; Alabuga is scaling a workforce on Telegram while its airframes still run on Western processors that have not yet been cut off. Cost-imposition logic visible in the $300 Molniya-2 versus the $50,000 Lancet scales because the workforce is structured around teenagers and African contract workers rather than skilled engineers. Export controls on Central Asian and Gulf re-export intermediaries, not Section 232 tariffs on Chinese hardware, are assessed as the lever most likely to constrain supply.
The legal and reputational layer matters. Teen labour as young as fourteen introduces ESG and humanitarian-law concerns for any Western component supplier whose chips end up at Alabuga. Telegram-based recruitment of gamers signals a domestic operator pipeline alongside the manufacturing one, pushing the workforce question one step further: the kill-chain is being built around a labour pool that did not exist at scale in early 2024. Russia has run wartime youth-labour mobilisations before, and the longer the recruitment continues without targeted disruption the harder it becomes to unwind without coordinated multilateral export action.
