Ukraine says Russia is systematically adding drone training to school curricula, with students being taught by returning war veterans on how to operate one of the deadliest weapons used on the Ukrainian front.
While there have been isolated reports of drone training in Russian schools, Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SZRU) said it is now formally being adopted on a federal level.
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“In Russia, the systematic militarization of school education is gaining momentum: Children are being taught to fly combat drones under the guidance of military personnel, participants in the war against Ukraine,” the SZRU wrote in a Sunday press release.
“These are no longer separate experiments, but part of the federal course ‘Fundamentals of Security and Defense of the Homeland [OBZB],’ where the emphasis is on training drone operators,” it added.
The SZRU said that several Russian regions – including Kursk, Nizhny Novgorod, Vologda, and Vladivostok – have begun rolling out federally mandated drone training in schools.
Some regions are implementing changes to existing compulsory military training, while others are incorporating drone education to existing subjects, such as mathematics and physics, as in the case of Vladivostok.
“In the Nizhny Novgorod region, tenth-graders will be taught to assemble and operate drones directly during OBZB lessons as part of the module ‘Military Training – Fundamentals of Military Knowledge,” the SZRU wrote.
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“In Vladivostok, the authorities plan to integrate the study of [unmanned aerial vehicles] UAVs into mathematics and physics lessons.”
Students are being taught to assemble and operate drones in regular classes and specialized programs, with hundreds of schools equipped and teachers retrained.
Basic military training, delivered through a course called “Fundamentals of Life Safety” (OBZh in Ukraine, and renamed to OBZB in Russia in recent years), has long been part of both countries’ education systems inherited from the USSR, with male students typically learning to assemble and disassemble rifles and female students focusing on first aid.
But after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Moscow has also implemented military re-education on children in occupied Ukraine.
A September 2025 report by a Yale University research team found that Ukrainian children taken to Russia were also forced to assemble military equipment.
Researchers identified evidence at more than 39 of the 210 facilities holding tens of thousands of abducted children that they had been subjected to unlawful re-education and militarization programs, including producing equipment for Russia’s military.