Three identical offices and empty motorcades: WSJ reveals how Kremlin hides Putin
Photo: Putin runs Russia from three completely identical offices (Getty Images)
Three identical bunkers allow Russian President Vladimir Putin to govern Russia while concealing his position from officials and intelligence services, The Times reports.
Putin rules Russia from three identical conference halls located in different regions of the country. According to the CIA, all offices were built according to the same design and equipped down to the smallest detail.
Even the position of a pencil holder with a double-headed eagle on a lacquered wooden desk and ten perfectly sharpened pencils is identical in all three rooms. The offices have no windows, making it impossible to determine the Kremlin leader’s location from outside landmarks.
Communications and security
The Russian leader avoids using mobile phones and rarely goes online. He holds meetings via video link, using a flat monitor placed on a special mobile stand with wheels. The computers in these offices remain disconnected from the network or strictly isolated.
Engineers of the Presidential Communications Directorate maintain a special communications mode that encrypts Putin’s calls.
It is from these bunkers that Putin governs the country during the war, issuing orders to commanders on the front in Ukraine and tightening restrictions inside Russia.
Concealing his location
Officials who appear on screen during video meetings often do not know from which of Russia’s 11 time zones Putin is calling.
Staff sometimes announce that the President is moving to another city, send an empty motorcade to the airport, and dispatch a decoy plane, after which Putin appears on a video conference - creating the illusion of being elsewhere.
Engineers described this mode as an “information cocoon.”
Putin’s bunkers
The Kremlin leader has not one but several bunkers. Almost every one of his residences and estates across Russia contains underground facilities. All of them were designed and built long ago.
Earlier, BILD created a 3D model of Putin’s shelter in his palace near Gelendzhik in Russia’s Krasnodar region. The images show fortified premises and tunnels beneath the building. Journalists suggested that the tunnels could withstand a bomb strike and a chemical attack.
RBC-Ukraine also reported on Putin’s and Kabaeva’s residence in Valdai.
In May 2024, Andrii Yusov, Representative of Ukraine’s Defense Intelligence, stated that the agency knew the locations of the Russian President’s bunkers.
A week after this statement, a fire broke out in Putin’s unofficial residence located in Altai.
