In a closed-off facility around 620 miles east of Moscow, the Kremlin is luring hundreds of young African women to Russia with promises of a better life.
But what awaits them is not a Slavic paradise, but a living hell of grinding labour, racism, and in some cases, even prostitution.
The Alabuga Special Economic Zone (SEZ) is a compound in western Russia filled with dull corporate buildings that speak to Russia’s Soviet past more than its hi-tech wars of the present.
But this is a region that produces some of the most devastating weaponry that Moscow uses for its bloody war on Ukraine.
Working with a secretive Ukrainian investigative group I will call ‘Inception’, MailOnline was able to uncover a series of shocking revelations about a scheme that brings African students from across the continent to Alabuga.
The ‘Alabuga Start’ programme was set up in 2023 for foreign students who want to relocate to Russia. Its website declares that it is ‘designed for ambitious girls between 18-22 years.’ It promises job opportunities, scholarships, fully funded training, Russian language courses, accommodation, paid flights to Russia, and health insurance.
In some adverts, candidates are promised a salary of $700 per month – a huge sum in their home countries.
But the truth is very different.
Alabuga is in fact a facility dedicated to manufacturing the Shahed drones that Russia uses to attack Ukrainian cities daily.
And those who join the start programme do not learn valuable skills, but end up doing a variety of menial jobs, including cleaning and working in the canteen.
A Ugandan currently in Russia revealed that almost everything they were promised was false. “The working hours are longer, and the payment is not the $700 that we were promised,’ she said in a message to Ugandan publication New Vision. We sleep in hostels and are constantly monitored. Besides, the $700 that we were promised is subject to a lot of deductions, including accommodation, bus fare and taxes.”
Inception passed a dossier containing several files, one of which is an audio recording of one of their investigators discussing possible employment at Alabuga and Anastasia, an HR manager at start.
Such is the level of forensic detail that its investigators have been able to acquire Anastasia’s full name, address, date of birth, phone number and event tax ID number, which we have decided not to publish to protect her privacy.
Her contempt is clear as she speaks about the women who come. ‘They don’t learn Russian well and speak English incomprehensibly — and they smell and look strange,’ she says of those from the West African country of Sierra Leone.
The racism may be casual, but it is no less shocking for that.
Indeed, it was also able to discover that African women are kept on their own dormitory floor, segregated from all other nationalities – which is to say white people.
This is all a far cry from the Russian state’s claims about Start.
Russia’s Ambassador to Uganda, Vladlen Semivolos has boasted about the ‘number of Russian scholarships allocated to Ugandan high school graduates. This number doubled this year, and the number now stands at 50,’ he said.
Anastasia, however, would beg to differ. ‘They come on a work visa and work in the economic zone itself and at the same time they learn Russian,’ she said. ‘But this is a work visa, it is not a scholarship or an educational program, it is work.’
And, make no mistake, the Russians make sure they get their pound of flesh from those they lure over.
When a 21-year-old Zimbabwean woman was accepted by the start programme her family was overjoyed. The money she sent home would help them all to escape the grinding poverty that had plagued them all their lives. It was a dream come true
But their joy would prove short-lived. ‘We frequently communicated during her first months in Russia, but now she is hardly reachable and we only wait from her to call us as she says she will be busy and they are not allowed to use phones at her workplace, which she said is a security zone,’ said her father to Humanitarian Media Focus on Zimbabwe.
“She hardly sends money here as she says she is not earning much and the last time we talked to her she said what she was promised is completely the opposite of what she is facing. So we told her to come back but she said she will have to raise money for air tickets for some months, if she is allowed to leave,” he added
Further investigations reveal that employees are under strict curfew and are barred from bringing phones into the factory. They also risk being fined heavily if they disclose what happens at the factory.
Trapped in a closed off zone, in a foreign country, with insufficient funds to leave, it seems that some women are forced into prostitution as their nightmare deepens.
Screenshots of a text from a man from the city of Chelny close to Alabuga explains how he ordered a black prostitute to his apartment. She had been forced into prostitute after being fired from Alabuga, she told him.
Further investigation reveals showing screenshots of the prostitution services offered by African women in Alabuga itself.
MailOnline cannot say for certain that these women are employees at the SEZ. But because of the facility, access to the city is restricted. So it’s hard to imagine what other African women would possibly be there.
Indeed, many wonder why the start program is only for girls. Representatives from the Alabuga Start program have an answer: that many of the ‘professions available require a certain level of feminine attention to detail.’
What makes the Alabuga case even more nauseating is that Russia’s denials and pious cant goes all the way to the top.
Discussing his country’s relations with Africa, President Vladimir Putin recently declared that ‘We have never exploited African peoples, nor have we engaged in anything inhumane on the continent.’
‘On the contrary,’ he added smugly. ‘We have always supported Africa in its struggle for independence, sovereignty and creation of basic conditions for economic development.’
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