For the past three years, many young men in Russia have been doing everything they can to avoid getting sent to fight in the war against Ukraine.
But some Russians are enthusiastically signing up for service in what President Vladimir V. Putin has called the battle for his nation’s survival by joining a drone brigade offering short stints far from the fighting.
Pro-war Russian bloggers have described the unit, Kaskad, as a “sinecure for officials.” Based in an undisclosed location in a part of Ukraine occupied by Russia, it provides a career boost to politically minded recruits, according to Kremlin watchers and military analysts who have labeled Kaskad a “V.I.P. unit.”
Hundreds of thousands of Russian men have been called up to fight in Ukraine since 2022 and have been kept at the front as a terrible death toll mounts by the day. But stints with Kaskad tend to be short-term. And given that it is a drone unit away from the front lines, the chances of being put in danger’s way are relatively small, analysts say.
Officials assigned to the unit usually stay three to eight months, get plenty of photo ops with automatic rifles and return to their jobs in Russia with a hero’s welcome, according to numerous social media posts in which recruits have documented their deployments, and accounts pieced together by military analysts.
“Enlistment with Kaskad allows Russian elite figures to sidestep statutory Russian military service requirements with guaranteed safety and potentially curry favor with the Kremlin,” Britain’s defense ministry said last year.
More than 270 pro-Kremlin regional lawmakers and 200 members of the youth wing of the governing United Russia party have served in the Russian Army in Ukraine, according to Andrei Turchak, the party’s chairman. At least six members of Parliament, dozens of pro-Kremlin youth activists and even one cosmonaut have done so in Kaskad.
In November, 12 senior members of United Russia’s youth wing in St. Petersburg joined Kaskad on the same day.
Among them was Aleksandr Malikov, who promptly updated his profile picture on social media, which shows a clean-shaven man, wearing sunglasses and cradling an automatic rifle, standing in front of a building with shattered windows and smoldering rubble.
Just a few months earlier, Mr. Malikov was documenting his life as a local council member in St. Petersburg, giving flowers to a 103-year-old resident or collecting litter in a forest.
In a series of messages with The New York Times, Mr. Malikov described his decision to enlist as a patriotic duty but declined to describe his role at Kaskad.
“Here, I keep on doing the same thing I’ve been doing for many years: supporting my country and taking an active role where I’m needed,” he said.
Dmitri V. Sablin, a longstanding member of the Russian Parliament, has been commanding Kaskad since the fall of 2022, after it was merged with a Ukrainian separatist brigade.
In 2023, a camouflage-clad Mr. Sablin introduced a Kaskad team to reporters from Russia’s Channel One. The footage included two soldiers launching a combat drone from a field and others monitoring drone flights on a computer screen from a bunker.
Kaskad has at least 54 crews operating 10 types of reconnaissance and combat drones along the front line, Mr. Sablin said.
Stints in Kaskad have been helpful for the careers of some of its veterans.
Yevgeny Pervyshov was a low-ranking member of Parliament when he joined Kaskad in November 2022. After a year with the brigade, he returned to Moscow and enrolled in “Time of Heroes,” a program that aims to foster a generation of war-tested officials. Only Ukraine veterans can apply.
Mr. Putin spotted Mr. Pervyshov at a televised meeting and offered him a job. In November, Mr. Pervyshov became the first Ukraine war veteran to be appointed as a governor.
Lena Kolesnikova, a 55-year-old regional lawmaker from Chelyabinsk, joined Kaskad last February, after her husband, a member of Parliament, enlisted in the brigade. Her service was unusual; very few women join the Russian military.
During her time in Ukraine, the 55-year-old mother of three updated her busy Telegram feed, posting selfies in settlings like a forest clearing or next to a road sign for the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol.
In a social media post eight months later, Ms. Kolesnikova returned to her office, citing a backlog of work. A few weeks later, she was awarded a medal “for service to the Zaporizhzhia region,” one of the Ukrainian regions partially occupied by Russia.
Last month, United Russia announced that Ms. Kolesnikova would seek a party nomination to run for Parliament this month, lauding her experience in the war zone as “particularly valuable.” Her bid will be bolstered by a party decision to award an additional 25 percent to the vote totals of Ukraine war veterans seeking nominations.
Abbas Gallyamov, a former Kremlin speechwriter turned political consultant, said officials using Kaskad as a springboard were essentially gaming a call by Mr. Putin to promote veterans to leadership roles.
Mr. Putin’s goal “is to showcase a patriotic fervor that permeates the society from top to bottom,” Mr. Gallyamov said. But, “If you look into any war veteran who has been promoted to a significant position, this is not going to be a random person. It’d be someone who went to the war knowing full well there would be a job waiting for them.”
Living conditions for those serving in Kaskad are vastly different from frontline units, according to Conflict Intelligence Team, a research group that uses openly available material to study the Russian military. Deployments are usually much safer.
Reconnaissance units are typically stationed about a dozen miles from the front line, safe from short-range artillery. Officers and soldiers can be billeted in apartments or stay at hotels, rather than in trenches or dugouts.
It is not clear how many Kaskad members have been killed in the war. Last year, the brigade unveiled a monument in central Moscow to its fighters who died in Ukraine that had 18 names engraved on it, a number that would be far less than that incurred by most combat units.
With the start of the partial mobilization in the fall of 2022, Russia’s defense ministry put all soldiers in Ukraine on indefinite contracts.
None of the Kaskad members approached by The Times were willing to explain how they had been able to leave the unit after serving for short periods, in an apparent violation of the defense ministry regulations.
The long deployments at the front for thousands of ordinary Russians called up during the 2022 mobilization have prompted a small protest movement in Russia, even though questioning the war remains a crime.
Some wives of mobilized men have picketed the headquarters of the Russian defense ministry and staged small rallies to protest.
One woman from a Moscow suburb who attended the protests said her husband was conscripted in 2022 and had been fighting at the front since then. She asked that her name not be used, fearing retribution from the authorities.
“They are like slaves,” she said in a text message. “They are stuck in the war zone forever — and any attempt to escape will lead to prison.”
Alina Lobzina contributed reporting.
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