Russian kids forced to help make flying grenades for drones

Russian schoolchildren are being forced to make supplies for President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine — including parts for flying grenades being dropped by kamikaze drones, according to reports.

Young students at a school in the Republic of Tatarstan region were filmed putting the finishing touches on 3D-printed orange “tails” to be attached to VOG-17 grenades, according to the local channel Nokrat.

One schoolboy, Azamat Gimazov, explained with a smile that the grenade “is hooked to a drone, then dropped.”

The tail is needed “so it can fly evenly,” the boy said.

A reporter explained in a voiceover that although the brightly-colored “tails” may look like “toys,” they “help a grenade hit right at the target, when released from a drone, without flipping in the air.”

Since the start of the war in February last year, a growing number of afterschool programs and hobby groups for children have been churning out supplies for the military, ranging from camouflage nets to tourniquets.

Students as young as 9 at another school in Tatarstan have been handcrafting crutches and canes for soldiers injured on the frontlines, as part of the intensifying militarization of Russia’s education system.

Kids in an afterschool woodworking class at Aleksandro-Slobodskaya School have so far made more than 60 pairs of crutches, 40 of which had already been shipped off to hospitals, each with a handwritten “get well” note, reported local outlet Novosti Zainska.

It takes two hours to manufacture a pair of wooden crutches – a noisy work that has to be carried out after the end of the school day or in the evenings, so as not to disrupt other classes, the report said.

The same school has produced more than 2,000 trench candles for use on the front lines. 

Meanwhile, students in the remote Udmurtia region have been roped into knitting “stump stockings” for hospitals treating soldiers who had lost limbs in combat.

The report comes as Putin signed a law Tuesday making it compulsory for elementary and middle schools in the next academic year to offer Soviet-style “labor lessons” where students will be introduced to woodworking, sawing and repair work, reported the state-controlled NTV channel.

The law — set to be enforced next year — also bans students from using cellphones in class, except in emergencies involving a threat to life.