We are looking for “people with experience controlling flight simulators with joysticks” and “people who just sit and play for hours”. A “gamer background” isn’t bad either, according to the advertisement. However, the position is not a game tester’s job, but a request from the Russian mercenary group Wagner. Via the Russian social network VKontakte, they are looking for specialists for the control and maintenance of so-called UAVs, i.e. unmanned aerial vehicles, often referred to as drones.
As “Newsweek” reports, Yevgeny Prigozhin’s troops have been looking for new recruits since Monday after they recently suffered severe losses in Bakhmut and Donetsk and are now dependent on new personnel. Above all, career changers between the ages of 21 and 25 are in demand, preferably in good physical condition and with an affinity for technology.
The ad openly states that candidates without any military experience are eligible. The independent news platform “Verstka Media” contacted the number given by Wagner in a self-experiment. According to their own statements, they learned there that Wagner was looking for personnel for the Ukraine or Africa and had two types of UAVs in their arsenal. It said “We have two types of UAVs: copters and the more serious devices”. The mercenary recruiter left it open what exactly is meant by that. The quadrocopters are mostly products from the Chinese manufacturer DJI.
According to “Vertska Media”, Wagner is not a pioneer when it comes to recruiting people who enjoy spending their time playing video games. According to this, the Russian Ministry of Defense already placed an ad on Facebook in 2020 looking for people who want to “challenge friends offline” and “play according to the real rules, without cheats and scores”.
