“Everything changed this year.”
“All the ‘top’ people in the university are now calling on students to go to war.”
“Throughout the uni, there are posters about the UAV forces literally everywhere.”
“The pressure is colossal.”
These are all quotes from Russian students in direct messages to CNN. We are not naming any of them, or their universities, for fear of reprisals but accounts like these, along with a growing body of open-source evidence, suggest that Russia is quietly escalating a campaign to entice and pressure students into its drone forces.
It’s a move that risks creating tensions in Russia’s education system, and reveals the growing challenges for Moscow in sustaining recruitment for its four-year-long war in Ukraine.
Despite mounting battlefield losses, the Kremlin has managed to avoid a repeat of its disastrous “partial” mobilization in the fall of 2022, during which hundreds of thousands of men fled the country. But, experts say, this student-focused campaign is one of several signs that more aggressive recruitment tactics are on the rise again.
It’s different from previous efforts: students are being promised a one-year, fixed-term contract, the opportunity to serve far from the front line, and the chance to learn high-tech skills.
Yet experts and lawyers tell CNN this is likely a front for a standard, open-ended military contract, and, with many students skeptical of the promised incentives, universities are turning to coercion and threats to convince students to join up, they say.
By analyzing university websites, social media pages and local media reports, and speaking with several students inside Russia, CNN has found evidence of a widespread and multifaceted recruitment campaign. The effort appears to have started in earnest in January, two months after the Russian Ministry of Defense officially announced the creation of a new military branch, the Unmanned Systems Forces, dedicated to warfare involving unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones.
Universities across Russia began populating their social media accounts with slick recruitment videos, and posters. Some university social media accounts even featured in-person lectures by soldiers and veterans of Russia’s so-called “special military operation,” or SMO.
Groza, an independent, student-focused Russian news outlet, also shared with CNN its database of 269 universities and colleges in Russia and in occupied Ukraine that it says are involved in this recruitment campaign, based on open-source information and students contacting Groza directly.
They include some of Russia’s most prestigious universities. The St. Petersburg State University (Russian President Vladimir Putin’s own alma mater) openly advertises these contracts on its website, alongside long video lectures from university and military personnel detailing the benefits of joining up.
The Higher School of Economics in Moscow, ranked No. 2 on the 2025 Forbes list of top Russian universities, held an “Unmanned Systems Festival” in February, with recruitment posters for the country’s drone forces clearly on display.
The messaging is clearly tailored to young people. “You were told you were wasting time on video games,” booms the voice-over of one video linked to on VK (Russia’s version of Facebook) by the Kazan University of Architecture and Civil Engineering. “But there is a place where your experience is especially valuable.”
A video from the Plekhanov Russian University of Economics’ campus in Volgograd shows a split-screen: a gamer on one side, a drone operator on the other. The caption reads: “choose the right skin”. Several recruitment posts seen by CNN state that “e-sports players” or “gamers” will be given priority when applying.
Artem Klyga, a Russian military lawyer based in Berlin, claims the Russian Ministry of Defense has issued specific instructions to the universities on how to run this campaign. He has published documents on his Telegram page he says he received from one Moscow university, including a blanket letter addressed to “The heads of military training centers of federal state higher educational organizations” requesting that they “organize, alongside representatives of the Ministry of Defense, campaigns for students… and report daily to the main directorate of personnel at the Ministry of Defense.”
The “instructions” detail incentives to be offered to students, both male and female, including “a lower risk of coming under enemy fire” and acquisition of “unique knowledge and skills.” These exact offers are clearly visible in university recruitment material CNN has analyzed.
The documents also call for significant financial incentives, with federal and regional sign-on bonuses of no less than 400,000 rubles (almost $5,000) apiece. Some universities are going far higher. St. Petersburg State University promises a one-off payment of around $56,000 for those joining the military and a base annual salary of close to $70,0000.
The money is the only promise that is likely to materialize, said Klyga. “Everything (else) is a lie. This is simple contract with the Russian army, without deadline, without special term(s),” he told CNN.
According to Klyga and other lawyers and experts consulted by CNN, Putin has never canceled the decree on partial mobilization he signed in September 2022, even when the initial draft of 300,000 men was completed, and all mobilization activities suspended. That decree clearly states that “Contracts on military service, signed by service persons, continue to be in force until the period of partial mobilization is over.”
“It’s a trap,” said Sergey Krivenko, the head of Citizen. Army. Law., a human rights organization focused on helping service members and conscripts. “When the year ends, the student (now already a service member) will not be dismissed, just like they don’t dismiss any service members whose contracts have lapsed.”
The promise of a reduced risk of coming under fire is also not enforceable, experts say. “As soon as the person signs the contracts, he is literally a slave of Ministry of Defense,” said Grigory Sverdlin, who runs an anti-war charity called “Idite Lesom” (“Get Lost”), which helps Russians avoid the draft. “He can be sent to whatever unit the Ministry of Defense will need. There is no way to be able to choose.”
It’s not yet clear how many students have been successfully recruited through this campaign. At his annual end-of-year Q+A session in December, Putin claimed so many Russians, including students, wanted to join the Unmanned Systems Forces that the Ministry of Defense had to run a selection contest for applicants. CNN has reached out to the Russian Ministry of Defense to ask about numbers, and the contract terms.
And yet none of the students with whom CNN has spoken said they believed the Kremlin’s promises.
In some cases, students at risk of failing their courses are being sold the idea of joining the drone forces as the only way to avoid expulsion. One student told CNN he was called to a group meeting that was only for those with missing credits – either coursework or exams (referred to in Russian as “debts”) – and who had fallen behind. “They hinted strongly this would be beneficial for those with a lot of debts,” he said.
Another said that on one day several weeks ago, the “student office” in his university “almost expelled a third of our group and forced them to sign a contract on the spot to keep their place.” He passed on to CNN messages from a group chat among students on the day.
“She’s expelling everyone who has even one outstanding debt from their second year – that’s the bullsh*t!” said one in an audio message.
Another advises those in the group not to sign anything if called in.
A third student in the chat, who admits he has already been expelled, answers: “By Monday it’ll be too late, on Friday they sign all the orders, those who are at risk of the army you’ll either go to compulsory service and there they’ll make you sign a contract, or you sign now and you’ll operate drones 30-40km from the hottest point, those are the words of (the head of the student office).”
Several students have suggested that universities are also shortening deadlines to complete coursework, making it harder to pass.
“In early March, all those with debts were notified that the deadline for returning outstanding assignments was March 31, even if one outstanding assignment remained, they would be expelled,” one student told CNN.
Another told CNN that a staff member at her university had been seeking out the most vulnerable first-year students – those who were having mental health troubles or struggling to settle in – and targeting them specifically. First the students were invited to have a “personal conversation,” the student told CNN, “without any details about the meeting, and with a request not to tell anyone.” They were then told this was the best way to avoid mounting financial debt, and to guarantee they wouldn’t fail their degrees, she said, an approach the student described as “emotional abuse.”
Russia has, until recently, managed to drum up enough new recruits to replace its frontline losses, relying on a system of huge salaries and bonuses, as well as more coercive and deceptive side-campaigns targeting specific populations, like prisoners, and foreigners.
And yet there are signs that the system is no longer enough. Western officials estimated in February that Ukraine had managed to inflict losses that exceeded Russia’s recruitment rate, for several consecutive months. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky claimed by late March Russia had lost 89,000 troops (killed and seriously injured) so far in 2026 and had managed to recruit just 80,000 over the same period. Russia does not disclose its casualty figures.
Late last year Putin signed several decrees allowing for members of Russia’s military reserve to be called up for specific tasks and training, a move analysts from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a think tank in Washington, have warned may pave the way for rolling involuntary or covert mobilizations.
“That is a really big teller that the Kremlin is… trying to expand its powers to do (a) more coercive sort of recruitment than ever before, which is something that the Kremlin tried to avoid to the maximum in the past,” Kateryna Stepanenko, ISW Russia team lead, told CNN.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov acknowledged last week that the recruitment campaign for the Unmanned Systems Forces was underway, calling it “a completely open offer for a new branch of the military.”
And yet targeting the country’s youngest potential voters, and turning universities – traditionally seen in Russia as safe havens from military conscription – into recruitment pipelines, carries political risk for the Kremlin, experts say.
“(The students) understand what’s going on, mostly, and they do not like this oppression” by the authorities, said Klyga. “They’re not making… a group of supporters of the current political regime with these actions.”
“Government institutions are now a source of threat, saturated with propaganda, crippling very young people who were literally schoolchildren yesterday,” one student told CNN.
Another noted: “For me, in general, every passing year feels scarier than the last.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
