Students Recruited Into Russian Drone Units Have Begun Dying in Ukraine

Journalists have identified the first known case of a Russian student killed while serving in the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) forces.

As BBC News journalists discovered, 23-year-old Valery Averin, a resident of Buryatia, was killed in the Luhansk region on April 6—a few days after being sent to the front lines.

Averin signed a contract with the Russian Ministry of Defense in early January and underwent training as a UAV operator.

According to Oksana Afanasyeva, Valery’s adoptive mother, the training ended in late March, and on April 2, he called her for the last time to say he was heading to a place where “there is no signal.”

On April 8, she was informed that her son had been killed during a mortar attack.

“The boy spent three months training to be a UAV operator, and we sent him into an assault, right into the meat grinder. Someone who hadn’t even served in the army,” Afanasyeva said.

According to her, Averin wanted to serve in the army, but they wouldn’t take him: “They said he was mentally unstable or something like that. He lied to me—he said he was going to work for Wildberries. And when I found out he’d signed a contract, I nearly went crazy.”

Valery Averin was raised in an orphanage until he was 11, then placed with a foster family.

At the time he signed the contract, he was a senior at the Buryat Republican Technical College of Construction and Industrial Technologies.

The Russian Ministry of Defense announced the creation of Unmanned Systems Forces in mid-2025.

Shortly thereafter, a campaign was launched to recruit students from educational institutions into these units.

The Insider previously published an investigation into how students are lured into serving in the unmanned systems forces by promises of large payments or transfer to state-funded status, as well as threats of expulsion and denial of admission to exams.