By Clare Sebastian, Katharina Krebs, CNN
(CNN) — “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.
The pitch to students
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 246 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 experi