HUMAN RIGHTS ABUSES IN DRONE PRODUCTION AT YELABUGA: How China, Iran, and North Korea are enabling the Russian war machine

China, Russia, Iran and North Korea, known collectively as CRINK, are seeking to undermine U.S. leadership by weakening the rules-based international order. Human rights violations and trafficking at the Alabuga complex in the Russian town of Yelabuga illustrate the increasingly complex ties among the CRINK regimes.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 created a demand for drones that Moscow could not initially meet. Its answer was an arrangement to manufacture the Iranian-designed Shahed on Russian soil. This report contends that the burgeoning labor force that powers the Alabuga drone factory has become a site of gross human rights abuses and human trafficking.

Between March and May, Russia fired more than 200 drones each day into Ukraine, totaling over 8,000 launches in May and taking a terrible toll on Ukrainians.3 These drones, produced at Alabuga with trafficked labor, are fired indiscriminately at Ukrainian cities and power grids and used to kill Ukrainian soldiers and citizens. Global action is required to hold accountable the perpetrators of human rights abuses in this sector of Russia’s war machine.

The CRINK countries, though not in a formal alliance, increasingly enable one another to evade pressure, sustain conflicts, and threaten the free world.4 Democracies therefore must recognize that human rights and security are inextricably connected5 and respond collectively:

• The U.S. Department of State should lead efforts to inform targeted Global South countries of false labor recruitment practices that support Russia’s military industry.

• The U.S. Department of the Treasury should pursue and enforce sanctions against front companies and educational institutions that are enabling the human trafficking network.

• The United States, working through the United Nations, should establish a multilateral team to investigate the Alabuga complex.

• Democratic allies and the international community should consistently and publicly highlight the actions of complicit individuals, regimes, and firms to discourage future business partnerships and diplomatic engagement with CRINK.

• The U.S. administration should invest in existing alliances and build new coalitions with allies and partners to counter CRINK threats

Yelabuga demonstrates how the converging interests of China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea are supporting Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked war in Ukraine, strengthening these authoritarian regimes’ interests, and enabling gross and blatant human rights violations. The consequences of CRINK’s growing coordination extend beyond Yelabuga.

CONCLUSION CRINK is not a formal alliance, and its members often act bilaterally and according to their own interests. Yet their growing coordination demonstrates how authoritarian regimes can reinforce one another while challenging a rules-based global order, international norms, accountability, and respect for individual rights and human dignity. This can and must stop.

The contest between democracy and authoritarianism goes beyond the question of which system is superior. At its core is a more fundamental choice: Whether individuals exist to serve the state, or the state exists to protect the liberty and dignity of individuals. The choice is not and must not be abstract.

Authoritarianism does not stop at national borders. When dictators regard their citizens as instruments – or even expendable resources – of the state, rather than independent masters of their rights, dignity, and liberty, human lives and human dignity become political tools for pursuing geopolitical objectives. Labor can be exploited, wages confiscated, information controlled, and people deployed in service of the regime. What begins as repression at home can and will become a source of authoritarian power projection abroad; when the free world chooses not to listen and act, authoritarianism will become stronger.

The Yelabuga story is more than just a series of human rights abuse cases. It is a clear illustration of how CRINK regimes are coordinating with and supporting one another. The challenge this creates is that the United States no longer has the luxury of countering crises one by one.

Additionally, there is never a good time to neglect or deprioritize human rights. In fast-changing geopolitics, where transactionalism, interest-based relationships, and tit-for-tat diplomacy are cast as the currency of international politics, deprioritizing human rights may appear not only tempting but also pragmatic and strategic. It is not.

*WHO ARE THE TRAFFICKED VICTIMS?

The workers at Yelabuga belong to three broad groups: 1) Russia’s domestic youth; 2) foreign workers; and 3) North Korean laborers.

While the coercive practices of the Russian government should be examined in the first two groups, the North Korean government is openly renting out its own citizens as forced labor and pocketing the earnings in violation of U.N. sanctions. This is the core human rights abuse taking place at Yelabuga.

Three labor groups at Alabuga

1. RUSSIAN YOUTH- Students as young as 15 are recruited by Alabuga Polytechnic college under a “work experience” label Shifts of up to 12 hours, pay tied to strict quotas, with threats of fines if they tell their families what they build Thousands; about one- third in drone production

2. FOREIGN WORKERS Women ages 16 to 22, mainly from Africa and the Global South as part of the Alabuga Start program. Promised hospitality work, then assigned to weapons production. Flights, housing and language classes are deducted from pay and passports confiscated on arrival. About 200 on site in 2024; about 90% in drone assembly

3. NORTH KOREANS STATE-SENT: laborers and technicians Minders restrict movement and the regime withholds 70% to 90% of wages. Up to 12,000 North Korean workers;

• The Alabuga Polytechnic college in Tatarstan, in east-central Moscow, recruits Russian youth, some as young as 15, for jobs at Alabuga under a “work experience” label. They reportedly work shifts of up to 12 hours. Their pay is tied to strict quotas. They also face threats of fines if they tell their families what they build.

• The Alabuga Start program recruits foreign women ages 16 to 22 from the Global South. They are promised catering and hospitality work and high wages but then learn on arrival that their jobs are in weapons production. They also find their flights, housing, and language classes coming out of their pay, and their passports are confiscated upon their arrival.

• North Korean laborers are sent to the factory by the regime. Defence Intelligence of Ukraine estimates up to 12,000 have been assigned to Alabuga out of more than 17,800 North Koreans

VIDEO

North Korea sends 12,000 factory workers deep inside Russia to boost drone war
RFU News — Strategic Geopolitics
700K subscribers
Oct 24, 2026
LENGTH 5:04 minutes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVqMxOzkRV0

Today, the biggest news comes from the Russian Federation.

“Here, twelve thousand North Korean workers are being sent directly into one of the most important parts of Russia’s wartime drone industry. A joint CSIS and George W. Bush Institute report says twelve thousand North Korean workers have been sent to the Alabuga special economic zone, where Russia assembles Shahed type attack drones used in mass strikes against Ukraine. The workers receive around two dollars and fifty cents per hour, while the North Korean government takes between seventy and ninety percent of their wages. Russian youth and other foreign workers are also employed at Alabuga, which is already producing more than five thousand five hundred drones per month. For Moscow, this gives the Shahed program another large source of tightly controlled manpower, while Pyongyang gains another way to profit from sending its workers to Russia.

This deployment follows Kim Jong Un’s pledge to expand and deepen cooperation with Russia, while promising what he called invariable support for Vladimir Putin and the Russian people. Kim said Pyongyang intended to widen cooperation under the countries’ alliance relationship and openly backed Russia’s war, describing it as a sacred struggle that Moscow would ultimately win. Inside Russia, however, North Korea’s expanding role in supporting the Russian war effort is already creating unease. One Russian journalist directly asked Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov how Russia had reached the point where its closest remaining partners were North Korea and Iran. Lavrov answered by asking what was wrong with such company, exposing the contradiction between the Kremlin’s image of Russia as a modern state and its increasing reliance on heavily sanctioned states such as North Korea and Iran.

North Korean support is also spreading beyond military production, as North Korea is sending organized female labor brigades into the Russian economy through outsourcing companies. These workers are being placed on assembly lines, in sewing factories, kitchens, and farms, with advertised wages starting at around just four hundred eighty rubles, or roughly six dollars, per hour. For Moscow, this provides another disciplined workforce at a time when the war is placing pressure on available manpower, while Pyongyang gains another channel for extracting income from citizens sent abroad. With North Korean workers entering more sectors of the Russian economy, both governments are also building the infrastructure needed to move far larger numbers of people and goods across their shared border.

The expansion of North Korean labor inside Russia is being matched by a new transport route capable of moving far more people and cargo across the border. Russia and North Korea have opened their first road crossing across the Tumen River, adding a separate route for trucks, buses, and passenger vehicles alongside the older railway only Friendship Bridge. The new crossing is around one kilometer long, while the nearby Khasan checkpoint is designed to process up to three hundred vehicles and two thousand eight hundred fifty people per day, with plans allowing that capacity to expand further. Russian officials promote the bridge as a project for tourism and trade, but it strengthens a relationship in which North Korea already supplies Russia with artillery shells, missiles and troops. The crossing can also move more workers into Russia and carry industrial or military cargo in both directions. By expanding the border from a single railway connection into a road and rail network, Moscow and Pyongyang are creating the transport capacity needed to sustain a much deeper economic and military relationship.

Overall, Russia’s growing reliance on North Korea is creating a support system that can keep expanding even as Western sanctions and diplomatic isolation narrow Moscow’s alternatives. The deeper this system becomes, the more Pyongyang gains leverage over Russian weapons production, labor supply, and access to additional manpower during a prolonged war. Permanent road and rail links also give both governments more ways to distribute trade and military related traffic across smaller movements that become harder to track and disrupt. With North Korean workers entering Russian factories and new transport capacity connecting the two countries, Moscow is allowing Pyongyang to become part of the industrial machinery sustaining the war rather than remaining an outside supplier of weapons and ammunition.”

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