Wearing helmets marked with Russian flags, the men leap from tanks to a Daft Punk soundtrack made for a sci-fi movie, brandishing Kalashnikovs and rocket launchers.
Then comes a Hollywood-style voiceover: “State corporation Roscosmos calls on you to join the Uran volunteer battalion, where you will be trained for victory in this great war.”
The advertisement marks a new frontier for Roscosmos, Russia’s state space agency, a partner of Nasa that regularly sends cosmonauts to the International Space Station — but is now, according to the recruitment videos, teaming up with the Russian army to raise, fund and equip a militia to fight in Ukraine.
The contrast could hardly be more stark given Roscosmos has faced no direct western sanctions. Three Roscosmos cosmonauts are currently orbiting the earth alongside American astronauts, at the same time as Roscosmos militiamen are being drafted to fight against US-supported Ukrainian forces.
The recruitment adverts put the space agency, heir to the venerated Soviet programme that pioneered space flight, at the vanguard of a different state project: Russia’s shadow recruitment drive to bolster its combat force without launching another destabilising round of conscription.
Ruslan Leviev, an independent military analyst and head of the Conflict Intelligence Team, said his team tracking the Uran battalion’s recruitment drive had yet to find evidence it had been deployed on the frontline.
But one influential cheerleader of Russia’s brutal full-scale invasion of its neighbour has presented Roscosmos as setting the example for how to attract volunteers for the frontline with “magnificent” videos and good terms.
“All this does not guarantee high efficiency of the unit, but at least it provides an influx of volunteers, reducing the likelihood of a new wave of mobilisation,” said a post on Rybar, a Telegram channel run by Mikhail Zvinchuk, a former press secretary at the Russian defence ministry.
After its invasion forces floundered in Ukraine last year, Moscow began quietly mobilising tens of thousands of volunteers to join frontline militias, compelling big state entities such as gas group Gazprom and Roscosmos to help recruit with ad campaigns and competitive salaries.
But many of the volunteer battalions fighting in Ukraine have maintained independence from the army, with the Wagner paramilitary group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin often revelling in criticising the military’s top brass. It has left a chaotic jumble of at least 40 different fighting forces that the ministry of defence is attempting to bring to heel.
The Uran battalion, which is the Russian word for the planet Uranus, stresses its allegiance to the defence ministry across its materials. It pledges that its recruits will sign contracts with the regular army, making it a model example for how the defence ministry would like such units to behave. Last week, the ministry set a deadline of July 1 by which it wants all other volunteer units to be similarly absorbed into its structure.
A second recruitment video described Roscosmos as fulfilling “all of the tasks set by the defence ministry” by organising, training and equipping the Uran militia. It is not exclusively made up of Roscosmos staff, but “employees of the aerospace sector” are offered special benefits and terms, according to a poster shared on the website of a subsidiary.
The origins of the militia appear to be outside of the agency: a Moscow mixed martial arts club that advertised military-style training courses for prospective soldiers. The battalion’s webpage is owned by an “association of sport, patriotic and veteran organisations” established in 2014 called The Shield and the Sword, a reference to the KGB’s logo.
But more recently Uran’s glossy posters, which look like adverts for a computer game featuring heavily-armed Russian soldiers, have begun to sport the Roscosmos logo, and advertise specifically for fighters for frontline duty in Ukraine.
One poster shows soldiers Photoshopped next to space shuttles and celebrates the international day of human space flight.
Recruits receive a 100,000 roubles ($1,200) sign-up bonus and a monthly frontline duty salary of 270,000 roubles, with payments coming from the defence ministry and the battalion.
Roscosmos, like state corporations such as Gazprom, has never acknowledged any role in supporting militias. There is no mention of the Uran battalion on the website of Roscosmos. The space agency did not respond to a request for comment.
But adverts for Uran do appear on the website of a state company that supplies the space agency, called Turbonasos, and on the social media page of Roscosmos subsidiary NPO Avtomatika, which is a space-rocket hardware manufacturer.
The recruitment drive also appears to be a company-wide effort. One Uran battalion video shows its adverts being played on a big television screen in an office entrance hall. This is being done “in all 120 enterprises of the state corporation Roscosmos”, the video claims, adding it is to “raise the general morale of its 170,000 employees”.
The entrance hall appears to be a Roscosmos building. Two clocks can be seen on the wall, one telling the time in Moscow, the other in French Guiana — an unusual addition in Cyrillic to an office entrance wall, except that Roscosmos used to launch rockets into space from the Kourou site in French Guiana, together with the European Space Agency.
The decades of close collaboration between Roscosmos, Nasa and other western space agencies was one of the success stories of the perestroika era. It put an end to the competition over space exploration that defined the cold war, which also saw the Soviet space programme — the forebear to Roscosmos — send the first man into space.
Roscosmos announced in 2021 that it would start withdrawing from the ISS, marking the beginning of the end of this period of international co-operation. But its relationship with Nasa continued, albeit under some strain. Even after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the two agencies have regularly shared seats on missions to the ISS.
Unlike most Russian state entities, the space agency has not been targeted by substantial western sanctions since the invasion, despite the inflammatory pro-war rhetoric of its former head, Dmitry Rogozin.
Rogozin was removed from his post in July 2022, a few months after the full-scale invasion began. Since then, he has gone out of his way to demonstrate his support for the war, travelling to the occupied Zaporizhzhia region in southern Ukraine and announcing himself as the leader of a volunteer “military advisers” unit on the frontline called “The Tsar’s Wolves”.
Frequently dressed in camouflage in public appearances, he was injured in Russian-occupied east Ukraine in December, hit by shrapnel while dining in a restaurant with a Moscow-appointed local governor.
One of the military callsigns adopted by Rogozin in Ukraine: “Cosmos”.
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