Russia pressures university students to become wartime drone pilots

Nonetheless, Russia’s effort to recruit student drone pilots goes toward its goal of having 168,000 drone operators by the end of 2026, according to the Kyiv Independent. In that sense, Russia is copying the success of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Force that became the world’s first standalone military branch focused on drones in June 2024.

The Russian recruitment efforts have typically promised that university students can serve as drone pilots without risking their lives in bloody infantry assaults on Ukrainian trenches and fortifications. But safety is a relative term as constant surveillance and the threat of drone strikes or artillery fire has created a “kill zone” stretching as far as 25 kilometers on both sides of the frontlines, according to the commander of Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Force in an interview with Ukrainksa Pravda.

The Russian-language news service of BBC News identified 23-year-old Valery Averin as the first known death among the new wave of Russian university students who trained and deployed as drone operators. Averin’s adoptive mother, Oksana Afanasyeva, was informed of her son’s death in a mortar attack on April 6 near the Russian-occupied city of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

“The child had been training on a drone for three months, and now we’re throwing him into an assault, into the meat grinder, someone who had never served in the army,” Afanasyeva told BBC News.

Russia has lost an estimated 1.3 million soldiers as battlefield casualties since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, according to a NATO official cited by news reporting in February 2026. By comparison, Ukrainian casualties were estimated as being between 500,000 and 600,000 over approximately the same period, including killed, wounded, and missing soldiers.