Vladimir Putin’s preferred mode of transportation these days is said to be a customized armored train because the Russian president is “scared” that his private plane could be shot out of a sky, according to a new report.
Ilya Rozhdestvensky, a reporter with the anti-Kremlin investigative unit the Dossier Center, told CNN that since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Putin has mostly stopped using his presidential aircraft.
Instead, he reportedly has traveled in an armored train equipped with a special communication system.
“The psychological reason of using this train is that he’s scared,” Rozhdestvensky told the outlet. “He’s scared that he can be tracked, that his plane can be tracked, that his plane can be shot down.”
According to the investigative reporter, the Russian leader believes that traveling by train is safer and that “nobody will know where he is going.”
The Dossier Center, which has uncovered Putin’s purported new travel arrangements, is financed by exiled Russian oligarch and opposition activist Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who launched the project in 2018 to track the suspected criminal activities of people associated with the Kremlin.
With the war in Ukraine nearing its first anniversary, the UK Ministry of Defense reported in an intelligence update Friday that Moscow’s forces have likely suffered up to 200,000 casualties since Feb. 24, including as many as 60,000 soldiers killed. --->READ MORE HERE
Russian President Vladimir Putin has an extensive chain of secret bunkers stretching from Moscow to the Urals, and new underground shelters continue to be built in Russia.
Source: investigation by the Sobesednik (‘Interlocutor’) media outlet; Oleg Roldugin, Editor-in-Chief and author of the investigation, in an interview with the Dozhd TV channel
Quote by Roldugin: "Bunkers had been built even in Soviet times for top state officials, but this has intensified lately. We know for sure that there are bunkers in Moscow, in the Urals and in the Volga region."
Details: According to Roldugin, Putin has two bunker systems, including those on and those off the record.
The "official" bunker system is within the purview of the Chief Directorate for Special Programmes of the Russian president, a separate official security body that is subject directly to the president.
In the course of the investigation, Roldugin found out that the same construction workers who build the official bunkers and tunnels under Putin’s palace in Gelendzhik [Krasnodar Krai] are also building private shelters for the president.
The number of private bunkers is significantly higher than those which can be identified from official contracts or other documents.
As the journalist reports, diggers have revealed that the tunnels in Moscow go down up to 200 metres underground; they accidentally found those tunnels, were sentenced to probation or actual prison terms and had to leave Russia.
Roldugin added that after Putin became president, renovation of the bunkers began. For instance, the lifts to the Moscow bunkers were modernized, worth 55 million rubles [approximately US$902,000 - ed.] being spent on three lifts. --->READ MORE HERE
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