Inside the online video game that lures young people to a Russian drone factory

The video game is like capture the flag — but with a Slavic twist, and a dark secret. 

In Drone Battle: Ukraine, rivals Russia and NATO battle it out until one side conquers enemy territory using “infantrymen, pilots and interceptors.” But the online war simulator, available in English, Russian and Chinese, isn’t like other free online games; its primary purpose isn’t about having fun. 

Rather, the game’s web domain is registered to Russia’s Alabuga Special Economic Zone, a secretive drone production operation in Tatarstan that plays a central role in the country’s war in Ukraine. Promoted online by video game streamers and social media influencers, Drone Battle: Ukraine is just one tentacle in a Russian influence campaign that lures young people to the factory under false promises of riches and education, experts told Straight Arrow. 

Once there, recruits from across the globe — including Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America — are coerced into assembling weapons of war. One report, published earlier this year, alleges the recruitment campaign amounts to “human trafficking and forced labor.” 

The game is “part of a big marketing funnel,” said Evgeniy Nasyrov of the independent science publication T-Invariant, founded by Russian expats. Nasyrov, who is based in Portugal, first linked Drone Battle: Ukraine to Alabuga, including through a registered patent which describes it as an “assessment tool in game form.” 

But Alabuga “isn’t selling burgers or buildings,” Nasyrov told Straight Arrow. They’re “selling people for the war,” to both build and operate kamikaze drones. 

The global influence campaign, called Alabuga Start, has relied heavily on U.S.-based social media platforms to reach recruits. Following investigative reports exposing Alabuga’s exploitative practices, technology companies including Meta and YouTube have taken steps to prevent the recruitment campaign from spreading on their platforms. 

But the disinformation and influence operation remains active elsewhere on social media, including on X and Telegram. And the game is part of a new strategy, Nasyrov said, that’s designed to bypass social media moderators. 

Inside the gamified recruitment funnel

Drone Battle: Ukraine isn’t the only video game playing a central role in the production of the Iranian-designed surveillance and kamikaze attack drones that Russia has deployed against Ukraine. 

In an X post in mid-July, Alabuga promoted a game called “Construction Works,” and exhorted social media users to “imagine you’re in a real video game.” 

“Experience what it’s like to be a Constructor,” the company wrote in an X post that included an animated video depicting women cleaning a truck, pouring concrete and conducting other manual tasks. “Overcome obstacles, collect bonuses for bold decisions and advance level by level.” 

Alabuga didn’t respond to email and Telegram requests for comment from Straight Arrow. 

Another simulation game part of the campaign is called “Business Cats,” according to a post on Alabuga Start’s Telegram channel. Alabuga games are “more than just fun,” the Telegram post says, and are designed to develop strategic thinking, analytical skills and teamwork. 

“At Alabuga Start, we believe leaders aren’t found — they’re made,” the post says. “And the simulation games are a key step on that journey.” 

X and Telegram didn’t respond to messages seeking comment from Straight Arrow. 

According to T-Invariant, Drone Battle: Ukraine’s role in Alabuga’s youth recruitment effort includes “Dronecon” esports tournaments, which are used to further promote the war effort. 

The gamification strategy isn’t unique to Drone Battle: Ukraine, and Russia has for years leveraged gaming platforms and streamers to address labor shortages for its war effort. Straight Arrow first reported on the recruitment effort in 2025. At the time, the effort centered on a government-sponsored game called “Berloga,” in which players controlled “intelligent bears” to fend off enemies using drones. Similarly, the game’s top players, as young as 13, were offered spots in national esports competitions and ultimately recruited to drone manufacturing. 

The goal of the games and social media campaigns is to normalize war among young people, Nasyrov said. 

“They try to mix the modern technology, modern science, social media and computer games — the things that young people are interested in — and mix it with the war and the needs of the war,” he said. “The game normalizes” flying drones, which are portrayed as a technological innovation and not “like a weapon used to kill someone.” 

An esports tournament held in February made “the loudest splash in the media, on social networks and on YouTube,” according to T-Invariant. The competition was won by a prominent video game streamer who was active on the Google-owned video platform YouTube as recently as last month, according to a Straight Arrow review of the streamer’s social media profiles.  

Drone Wars “is more complicated,” than other games used in the tournament, the streamer wrote on X in March. The streamer said he “had a blast” participating in the tournament — ”it was certainly the biggest one ever held!”

How social media feeds facilitate drone recruitment

To maintain its pipeline of workers to both build and operate fighter drones, Alabuga has relied heavily on Western tech platforms to recruit young people — many of them women between the ages of 16 and 22 — with free airline tickets, educational opportunities and promises of economic mobility. Recruits have described being offered scholarships and jobs in hospitality and general manufacturing before realizing they’d been tricked into producing weapons. 

Jiwon Ma, a senior policy analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank, said young women are a primary target demographic. 

“This is a vulnerable population,” Ma told Straight Arrow. She said recruits may see the online advertisements and view their offerings as a ticket to a new life.

“You’re helpless, you need to make money, you need to make a living but the opportunities aren’t there,” Ma said. “But then you see this women-focused career-development opportunity.’ 

To reach young people in Latin America and elsewhere, Alabuga has leveraged artificial intelligence and paid influencer partnerships to flood feeds on TikTok, Instagram and more, according to a report that Ma’s organization published in January. The U.S. government, the right-leaning group concluded, “should press online platforms to remove accounts involved in these operations.”

For platforms, thwarting the campaign is like “a cat-and-mouse game,” said Max Lesser, the foundation’s senior analyst on emerging threats.

“WIth any sort of malicious online activity, especially influence operations, enforcement has to be continuous,” Lesser told Straight Arrow. “There needs to be continual detection and enforcement.”

Enforcement by tech companies, alone, is unlikely to stop the recruitment, he said. Ultimately, he said, it’s up to local governments in targeted countries to deploy awareness campaigns. 

In a recent video on the Alabuga Start Telegram channel, a young woman who identified herself as Carol explained in English she chose to work as a production officer because the job offers a good salary with work-life balance allowing ample time on the weekends to complete house chores and visit friends while “walking in the park.” 

Meanwhile on X, an AI-generated video explains that foreigners in Russia are treated “warmly and with curiosity.”

“Of course, at first, being so far from my family was my biggest worry,” one of the AI-generated characters said. “But here, new friends and a supportive environment appeared very quickly.”

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies report, and a stream of investigative reports in the last few years, depict humans in captivity, lured from far-away countries, stripped of their passports, subjected to pervasive surveillance and cut off from the outside world. 

In the end, as many as 90% of people recruited through Alubaga Start find themselves working on drone assembly lines, according to a 2024 report by the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington-based think tank. 

Ma presented findings from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies report in July at a conference in San Francisco for trust and safety professionals within technology companies. She told Straight Arrow the recruitment campaign appears “on pretty much every social media platform” and, to the professionals at the conference, their findings were “a big shock.” That’s in part because the recruitment uses social media accounts that come across as authentic. 

“If you’re not looking carefully,” recruitment efforts can go under the radar, including those from influencers who boast about fun times and free merch, Ma said. “It almost feels pervasive in the sense that you and I are on instagram doing whatever we do with our friends, but on the same platform they’re recruiting people to work in drone plants.”

The Instagram accounts highlighted in the Foundation for Defense of Democracies report have since been removed, a Meta spokesperson told Straight Arrow.

How Russia’s strategy is changing

As academics and activists draw attention to Alabuga’s recruitment tactics and allege human rights abuses, U.S.-based social media platforms have increasingly taken actions to stop the campaign’s spread online. 

Andrii Sybiha, Ukraine’s minister of foreign affairs, announced in early July that some 600 videos promoting Alabuga had been taken down from YouTube. In total, Sybiha wrote on X, the recruitment videos were posted across hundreds of different channels with a total of more than 500 million subscribers. Similar purges have been reported at TikTok and Twitch. 

“The work does not end with removals,” Sybiha wrote. “We will be now pursuing sanctions against individual bloggers who accepted payment to promote a sanctioned weapons manufacturer to millions of viewers.”

Google, which owns YouTube, didn’t respond to emails seeking comment. 

In the face of the bans, Alabuga’s influence operators have been forced to adapt, Nasyrov said. They’re relying more heavily on Telegram, where their reach is more limited than on mainstream platforms like YouTube. And they are using proxies to evade detection and, ultimately, platform bans. 

“They’ll use influencers and things like that and that makes it harder because they’re not only going to be recruiting from official Alabuga accounts, and not even from unofficial Alabuga accounts,” Lesser said. “They might just pay somebody in whatever country to say ‘Hey, I went to Alabuga, it was amazing,’ or potentially do something even more discreet.”

Meanwhile, Nasyrov said, Dronecon cyber tournaments featuring Drone War: Ukraine competitions, with million-ruble prizes, have also taken on a bigger role in the scheme. He said the use of gamified simulators highlights a worrying trend in which digital games and influencer culture are leveraged to normalize — and ultimately prop up — real-world war. 

Recent efforts by social media companies against the recruitment operation amount to “a small victory,” Nasyrov said, but haven’t stopped the campaign from taking on new forms. 

“You kill one head,” he said, “and the other head rapidly grows.”

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