Pensioners With Drones and Russia's Fog of Information Control

Russia is now training elderly pensioners to operate drones as part of its expanding civilian drone programs tied to the war in Ukraine. A headline from inside Russia called it exactly what it is: complete absurdity. This episode unpacks what that program actually signals about the demographic and military pressures the Kremlin is facing, from mobilization waves the government refuses to call mobilization, to a pension system that already triggered nationwide protests in 2018. When a country starts handing joysticks to retired schoolteachers, it is not a heartwarming community story. It is a window into how a prolonged war consumes everything it can reach. The second story digs into how Russian state media maintains its grip on the information environment, not by convincing everyone, but by making people uncertain enough, tired enough, or scared enough to stay quiet. The system does not need true believers. It needs a fog dense enough to disorient. But casualties are not abstract. They come home. And the gap between official figures and what Russian families are actually living is quietly corroding the architecture from the inside. Throughout the episode, the host reflects on what it means that people inside Russia can still see the absurdity and still name it, even in a single wry headline, even in a joke to a neighbor. In a landscape designed to make clarity impossible, calling something absurd out loud is not nothing. It might be exactly the point. This episode is for anyone trying to understand what Russia actually looks like from the inside right now, not as a monolith of true believers, but as a country full of people navigating an impossible set of trade-offs in a system designed to make the truth as hard to hold onto as possible.

Transcript

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I do not know how much of what I do actually going to change the world and impact the people in Russia and even people around me, but I will never stop until my last breath. It doesn't matter if it's gonna take five days, five years, twenty five years, or fifty years. I will never stop. Welcome to Refugee from Russia Podcast. Today, three stories straight out of the place that keeps proving, without fail, that reality is stranger than anything a screenwriter could come up with. We've got pensioners being handed drones, we've got propaganda that somehow keeps getting more brazen, and we've got a government that treats its own citizens like props in a very bad play. Settle in. This is going to be a lot. Let's start with what might be the single most perfectly Russian headline to ever exist. And that is saying something, because the competition is fierce. Quote, complete absurdity. They want to teach pensioners to operate drones. End quote. Drones have become one of the defining weapons of this conflict, used for surveillance, targeting, supply runs, and direct strikes. And because the demand for drone operators has exploded, various Russian regional programs and state adjacent organizations have been scrambling to train more people. More and more people. Apparently, anyone they can find. And now, apparently, they have found Grandma. Think about what this looks like in practice. You are a 72-year-old retired school teacher in, say, Voronezh. You were planning to tend your garden this spring, maybe watch your programs, maybe argue with your neighbor about whose fence is on whose property. And instead, some regional official shows up and says, Good news, we are going to teach you to fly a drone. There is a version of this that sounds almost heartwarming, right? Like a feel-good American news segment. 80-year-old grandpa learns to use an iPad. Sweet local story. But that is not what this is. This is not a community enrichment program. This is a country grinding through a war that is eating its young men. And now it is looking sideways at the elderly and saying, your turn. The headline itself calls it complete absurdity, which tells you something. This is not a fringe opinion. The people writing about it, even within Russia's constrained media environment, are raising their eyebrows. There is a very specific kind of exhaustion that comes through in that phrasing. Not outrage, not horror, just complete absurdity. Like someone who has been watching a slow-motion disaster for so long that all they have left is a kind of flat, weary disbelief. In America, when we want to measure how stretched a military effort has become, we look at things like recruitment shortfalls, age waivers, or stop loss orders. There is a whole vocabulary for when an institution starts asking more from people than it was originally designed to ask. Russia has its own version of this, and it tends to be less formal and more improvisational. The pensioner drone program fits into a broader pattern. Russia has been leaning heavily on volunteers, on regional recruitment, on mobilization waves that the Kremlin tries very hard not to call mobilization. And now it is tapping into a population that most militaries consider a support base, not an operational one. There is also something deeply telling about the optics here. Russia has one of the largest elderly populations in Europe. The demographic picture is already difficult, shaped by generations of war, famine, and economic collapse. The pension system has been a political flashpoint for years. In 2018, when the government raised the retirement age, there were protests in cities all over the country. People were furious. The social contract, such as it was, felt broken. And now, a few years later, the message seems to be actually, retirement is not exactly what we said it would be. You are still useful to us. Here is a joystick. Whether this program actually produces effective drone operators is almost beside the point. What it communicates symbolically is a kind of desperation, a willingness to reframe the entire population as a resource to be deployed. The fact that it is drawing mockery even inside Russia suggests that people can see exactly what is happening, even if they cannot always say it directly. It is dark. It is also, in that very specific Russian way, almost funny. Because the alternative, sitting with the full weight of what it means, is something most people cannot afford to do every single day. So you make a joke. You say complete absurdity. And then you move on, because what else are you going to do? The pensioner with the drone is not just a punchline. She is a window into how a country looks when the machinery of a prolonged war starts consuming everything it can reach. You run out of the obvious resources first, then you get creative, then you get desperate. And eventually, someone is standing in a community center in a provincial Russian city explaining to a group of retirees how to calibrate a first-person view drone. Complete absurdity. Yes, that is exactly the right phrase for it. Alright, let's move on, because there is more. Story two. And this one is about the ongoing information war inside Russia, specifically about how the state continues to manage the narrative around casualties, losses, and the overall trajectory of the conflict. One of the more remarkable things about Russian state media, if you watch it regularly, which some people do for professional reasons and some people do because they genuinely cannot look away, is the confidence. Not the content, but the tone. There is a specific kind of assured, almost bored certainty in the delivery, as if the anchors and commentators have simply never considered the possibility that they might be wrong or that their viewers might be comparing notes with the outside world. This matters because information control is not just about suppressing bad news. It is about shaping what feels normal, what feels expected, what feels like the natural order of things. When a government controls the information environment well enough, it does not have to convince people that everything is fine. It just has to make the idea of things not being fine feel somehow foreign, suspicious, unpatriotic. Russia has been doing this for a long time, long before the war in Ukraine. But the war has accelerated things in ways that are genuinely hard to track. The machinery has had to work harder, move faster, and cover more ground. Every week there are new developments that need to be recontextualized, reframed, or simply not mentioned at all. Think about what that requires at scale. It is not just state television, it is local newspapers, regional radio stations, social media monitoring, the way teachers talk in classrooms, the way bosses talk in workplaces. It is an ecosystem, not a single broadcast. And here is what makes it complicated for American listeners to fully grasp. It is not that everyone inside Russia believes everything they hear. They do not. Russians have a long and sophisticated tradition of reading between the lines, of understanding the gap between official statements and actual reality. This is not a population of naive true believers, but there is a difference between not believing something and being willing to act on your disbelief. The system does not need everyone to be convinced. It needs people to be uncertain enough, tired enough, or scared enough to stay quiet. That is a much lower bar, and it is a bar that authoritarian information systems have become very good at clearing. The casualties question is particularly important here because casualties are not abstract. They come home, they arrive in zinc coffins, or in the form of a phone call, or simply in the form of someone who was there last year and is not there now. You can manage the official numbers, you cannot make the absence invisible, which is why the gap between what Russian state media reports and what Russian families are experiencing has been one of the most quietly corrosive things happening inside that country right now. People know they may not be able to say it out loud in certain contexts, they may not fully trust any specific alternative number they find. But they know that what they are being told and what they are living are not the same thing. That tension does not always produce open resistance. Sometimes it produces cynicism, sometimes it produces a kind of numb compliance, and sometimes it produces exactly the kind of dark, flat humor you see in a headline that just says complete absurdity and moves on. The information environment inside Russia is not a wall. It is more like a fog. Dense enough to disorient, thin enough in certain spots that you can see something through it, but confusing enough overall that navigating it takes enormous energy. Most people, most of the time, do not have that energy to spare. That is not a weakness or a failure. That is just being human in an impossible situation. Understanding this is important because it shapes how the rest of the world should think about what Russia is and what it is not. It is not a monolith of true believers. It is a country full of people managing an incredibly difficult set of trade-offs, trying to survive, trying to protect their families, trying to figure out what is true in a landscape designed to make all of that as hard as possible. The absurdity is not just in the drone training program, it is in the whole architecture. And the fact that people inside Russia can still see it, still name it, even if only in a headline, even if only in a wry joke to a neighbor means something. It means the fog has not won completely, that matters, even when it does not feel like it does. Even when the news keeps being exactly this kind of news, week after week, story after story, pensioners and drones and propaganda and zinc coffins and a government that seems to have no floor for how low it will go. There is still someone in Voronezh looking at a joystick and saying out loud, this is absurd, that person is not nothing. That moment is not nothing. That is what this podcast is built on, actually. The idea that naming things clearly, saying out loud what is happening in plain language, without dressing it up or softening it or making it more palatable than it is, that is not a small thing. It is maybe the most important thing. Because when everything is designed to make you uncertain, clarity is resistance. That's all for today's Refugee from Russia podcast. Thanks for listening, and we will be back with more.