By Ekaterina Janashia | 2026-06-04

Valery Averin hid everything from his foster mother. The 23-year-old final-year student from Buryatia told her he had found a job at the retailer Wildberries. In fact, he had signed a military contract, completed three months of drone operator training, and shipped out to Ukraine. Six days after his last phone call home -- in which he promised his family he would be safe -- a mortar killed him in the field.

Averin's death, confirmed by BBC News Russian on May 12, 2026, marks the first known fatality of a student recruited through the Russian Defense Ministry's campaign targeting universities. He had initially been rejected by the military for being "mentally unstable" but secured a contract with the unmanned systems forces by spring 2026. His foster mother, Oksana Afanasyeva, captured the arc of his fate in a single sentence: "The kid trained three months on UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], and we sent him into an assault, into the very meat grinder -- a person who had never even served in the army."

'The country believes in you'

Averin's case is not an outlier. According to student media outlet Groza, active recruitment campaigns now span at least 269 higher education institutions across Russia, including some in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territory. The campaign has a numerical target behind it. Russia's Minister of Science and Higher Education, Valery Falkov, communicated a quota of 2% of each institution's student body to the rectors of the country's largest universities at a closed-door meeting in early 2026. With approximately 2.2 million men enrolled in Russian universities, meeting that quota would deliver at least 44,000 recruits. Extended to vocational schools, the figure could reach 76,000.

University administrations have become extensions of the Ministry of Defense, and the approach is a calculated mix of incentive and coercion. Recruiters offer high salaries and academic leave, while threatening struggling students with expulsion. Students are promised a one-year contract, though the agreements are in practice open-ended. In cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg, students report being summoned to university "second departments," the offices responsible for military records, for routine "data verification," only to find a recruitment officer waiting with a contract.

At Kazan Innovative University, president Yulia Khadiullina told students who had failed exams they were "already expelled" -- but added that "each of you still has opportunities -- the country believes in you." She then made the stakes explicit: "The new army will be formed from students who can no longer be considered students. That means you."

At the Lunin College of Transport Technologies in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, college director Maria Kirsanova took a more confrontational approach during a recorded meeting last month. "Are you all cowards here sitting and being scared for your lives?" she asked students, dismissing their fear of returning home "in zinc coffins." She told the group she had expected all 400 eighteen-year-olds in the room to be the first to defend the Fatherland.

A technical trap

The campaign specifically targets students with academic debt, framing military service as an alternative to expulsion. Once at recruitment offices, students are told their deferments are precarious -- but that "specialized roles" in technical units, such as drone piloting, offer a safe path forward. The pitch targets a capable demographic: young men who grew up with technology and require less time to master UAV interfaces.

The promise of safety is false. Drone pilots rank among the highest-priority targets for Ukrainian forces, who use electronic warfare and counter-battery fire to locate and eliminate operators. As Russian military strategy relies increasingly on UAVs to compensate for infantry losses, the Defense Ministry has accelerated training cycles, sending students into active combat with only weeks of preparation.

Averin's death illustrates exactly that pipeline. Young men are routed from campuses into abbreviated training and then directly to the front.

'Sacrificing my peers' lives'

"The Russian state treats its youth as a renewable resource," Artyom, a Moscow university student, told Kontur. "By depleting the academic class, they are sacrificing my peers' lives today and destroying the country's intellectual and economic future."

The bait-and-switch leaves students trapped in combat zones before they fully grasp that their legal deferments have been voided by their own signatures. Averin, a former foster child, never told his family. His last phone call was April 2. He was dead by April 8.