A number of international media reports have exposed an operation called “Alabuga Start” that lures young African women to work at a Russian drone factory and then effectively enslaves them – but African governments have done little to protect their citizens from exploitation.

Alabuga Start is a program ostensibly intended to bring promising young people from the Third World to the Alabuga Special Economic Zone (SEZ). A sister program called Alabuga Polytechnic is aimed at recruiting Russian students.

The Alabuga SEZ was established in the Republic of Tartarstan in July 2006. The program was intended to lure science and industry to the SEZ by offering extensive infrastructure, abundant electric power, tax breaks, and customs benefits. Every company that builds a facility in the SEZ enjoys a ten-year “tax holiday,” and residents of the zone pay relatively low income taxes for their first ten years.

As investigations from various media outlets have revealed, recruits are not told that the major current purpose of the Alabuga SEZ is cranking out Iranian-designed Shahed-136 suicide drones to aid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions against the zone in April 2024, along with a dozen other entities and individuals, for “facilitating and financing the clandestine sale of Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles.”

In October, the Associated Press (AP) published an expose on Russia’s efforts to lure African women to its drone factory with free plane tickets, cash bonuses, and offers of a prestigious high-tech work-study program.

In truth, young African women who accepted the offer found themselves toiling in Russian munitions plants, working long hours under prison-like surveillance, all promises of high wages and cash bonuses forgotten. Even worse, the unskilled African recruits were required to use hazardous materials without proper safety equipment, leaving some with painful symptoms of exposure.

One victim described the Alabuga Start program as a “trap.”

“The company is all about making drones. Nothing else. I regret and I curse the day I started making all those things,” the woman told the AP.

“Factory management apparently tries to discourage the African women from leaving, and although some reportedly have left or found work elsewhere in Russia, AP was unable to verify that independently,” the report added.

Another grim detail was that Russia apparently prefers to lure young women to its Alabuga drone sweatshop because they are “easier to control,” while young African men are “too aggressive and dangerous.”

Leaked documents described the assembly lines as racially “segregated” and used “derogatory” language to discuss the African recruits.

A subsequent AP report said Alabuga, which now furnishes about 75 percent of Russia’s new drones, has begun producing “a particularly deadly variant of the Shahed unmanned aircraft armed with thermobaric warheads.” These “vacuum bomb” drones are accompanied by swarms of decoys to distract Ukrainian air defenses.

A week after the first AP report on the Alabuga trap, social media platforms YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok began shutting down accounts that were allegedly geared toward recruiting young foreign women to work in Russia’s drone factories. Some of those accounts had over a hundred thousand followers, or over a million “likes” for their posts, which were often promoted by professional social media influencers.

According to the AP, the Alabuga Start social media campaign used “slickly edited videos with upbeat music that show African women smiling while cleaning floors, wearing hard hats while directing cranes, and donning protective equipment to apply paint or chemicals.”

Some videos depicted African women cavorting happily among Tartarstan’s cultural sites and tourist attractions. One of them showed a happy African girl serving a handsome young Russian man in a restaurant, and then becoming his pregnant wife. Absolutely none of these recruiting videos informed viewers that the women were expected to perform hard labor at Russian drone factories.

Another investigation conducted by the Institute for Science and International Study in July said that some recruits were told they would be making drones, but they were falsely led to believe they would be assembling sophisticated M5 civilian drones, not Iran’s crude but effective Shahed-136 flying bombs. In a final bitter twist, a fair number of those M5 drones ended up being used for reconnaissance by the Russian invaders in Ukraine.

“Twenty-seven countries are documented to have sent nationals to Alabuga through Alabuga Start. It is unknown whether any countries have withdrawn their participation, but they should do so immediately,” the Institute said in July.

“If they continue to send workers, these countries directly support a U.S. and EU sanctioned entity and support Russia’s military efforts, thus risk getting sanctioned themselves,” the report warned.

Voice of America News (VOA) reported on Wednesday that “African countries have largely failed to intervene or give an official response” to the Alabuga Start investigations. In fact, some African governments “even appear to be building ties with the Russian entity behind the program.”

David Albright of the Institute for Science and International Security told VOA that African recruiters for Alabuga Start were originally “oblivious” to what the program was actually doing, but it now seems very difficult to believe they don’t know they are drawing young women into a trap.

“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,” Albright noted.

“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,” he said.

Despite this growing awareness of the true nature of the program, Alabuga representatives recently signed memorandums of cooperation with local entities in Sierra Leone, Zambia, and Madagascar. Nigeria and Uganda have been touting admission to Alabuga Start on government websites for at least a year.  VOA found documents from government ministries in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Bangladesh encouraging young citizens to apply for the Russian program.

VOA reported that it “reached out to authorities of Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, South Sudan, Sierra Leone, Ethiopia and Nigeria,” but none of its phone calls or emails were answered.