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You would think that the architects who designed Vladimir Putin’s palace thought of everything.
After all, the 190,000-square-foot, billion-dollar complex perched on a steep cliff overlooking the Black Sea has all the luxuries a dictator could want. The palace has its own church, wine cellar and casino, as revealed by Alexei Navalny’s research. There’s a hookah lounge with stripper poles, an arboretum, and an ice rink for hockey games that Putin likes with his entourage. Good luck with your takeout order though. Security is tight. Putin’s imperial dacha is cut off from the country he governs by 17,000 acres of woodland and a special no-fly zone.
This precaution is more than Putin’s delusion. Earlier this month, Russian officials claimed that two drones attempted to assassinate Putin, but the attack failed and ended in an explosion over the Kremlin.
But for all this royal opulence and castle-like defenses, the palace builders seem to have neglected one important detail. They failed to conceal a plan that showed two elaborate tunnels running under the palace grounds. The plan was that any competent national security agency would fight hard to keep the secret.
What was actually posted was Published on the Russian Internet. The now-defunct Russian contractor Metro His Style posted drawings on its website in the early 2010s to showcase their work. It was made available online in late 2016.
Insider now publishes an annotated version of the diagram and an English translation. You can find it below.
Underneath Putin’s palace, the underground complex consists of two separate tunnels connected by an elevator that descends to about 50 meters underground. According to the building plans, the thick concrete-enclosed tunnels will be supplied with sufficient fresh water, ventilation, and extensive cabling to support VIP residents for days or weeks at a time. Experts who have scrutinized the tunnel plan have noticed signs that Putin is obsessed with staying alive while other big names fall.
“President Putin has great anxiety that he is not a fully legitimate leader of Russia,” said Michael C. Kimage, a former State Department official who worked on Russia-Ukraine policy. “Therefore, he knows that elections will not fully secure his legitimacy, and he intends to ensure the greatest possible security for himself through a group of closely guarded private residences. will.”
The exits of these tunnels can be seen directly below the palace, on exposed cliffs rising from the beach.
The lower tunnel has a moving walkway leading to the exit. “There are all sorts of safety and security features in this tunnel installation,” said Thaddeus Gavryshewski, a structural engineer familiar with the defensive structure who reviewed the drawings for an insider. “We have fire equipment, we have water, we have sewers. This is for someone to survive or escape.”
All leaders of nuclear powers plan for extreme emergencies. The President of the United States has emergency bunkers in the basement of the White House and in Mount Weather, Virginia. However, unlike the US facility, the Black Sea facility was privately funded and remains privately owned. It seems to be aimed more at ensuring the survival of an individual than at ensuring the continuity of the political system. Built in the years when Putin was still openly advocating Russia’s European integration, the investment in the tunnel complex beneath the brand-new villa shows how long the Russian leader has prepared for threats and plans. It is proof that they have built a trap door to You must evacuate or flee. “We must see this as part of the long conflict with the West that has characterized the last 13-14 years of Putin’s life,” Kimaj said.
“These images are not blueprints,” Gabrishewski told an insider. “They are more like architectural drawings. They show the intention, flow and premise of these spaces.”
The two tunnels are about 40 and 60 meters long and about 6 meters wide, respectively, creating about 6,500 square feet of potential living space and showing signs of blast resistance. The ability to survive a nuclear or bunker buster bomb depends on two factors not shown in the diagram. It’s how the tunnel’s 15-inch-thick concrete shell is reinforced, and the material used to fill the perimeter of the tunnel. They are, said Mr. Gabrishewski.
These show some characteristics that suggest Putin commissioned this structure with the worst-case scenario in mind. Especially eye-catching is his rack of 16 cables, about a foot wide, embedded in the wall of the lower tunnel. These racks are designed for “conduit” cabling that can carry the electrical, lighting, copper and fiber optic cables required for command posts.
The sheer volume of conduit running through the lower tunnel is significant as it is far greater than is required to operate the internal systems of the tunnel itself. “These trays could be used for communications, lighting, power, or anything else that runs cables and tubes,” Gavryshewski said. “There’s a huge amount of cables in the tunnel alone, which means it could be something of a backup system for a palace complex.” It’s like a kind of emergency spinal cord for the whole palace.
Neither the Moscow-based company that bought Metro Style nor Kremlin chief spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to requests for comment. Putin denied owning the Black Sea Palace amid mass protests in the wake of Mr Navalny’s video investigation in 2021.
Metro Style was founded by three men in the 90s and later founded several construction companies, also hired by the Russian government to excavate underground tunnels in Moscow. When the company posted the diagram on its website, it did not specify that the Black Sea Tunnel was built for Putin. Instead, they described “a complex of underground structures for boarding houses in the city of Gelendzhik, Krasnodar Territory.” Gelendzhik is the closest town to the palace complex, he is five hours drive from the resort city of Sochi.
The presence of a fortified tunnel nearly 1,000 miles from Moscow shows that Putin isn’t just focused on enjoying luxury living near resorts. He also has an interest in staying alive. Kimage, a former State Department official and now a professor at the Catholic University, said survivalism was likely behind the tunnel’s remote location. “Two of the major turning points in Russian history, 1917 and 1991, were big questions about the status of the capital and the position of its leaders,” Kimage said. “Putin is trying to solve this contingency by establishing a network of settlements as far away from the center as possible. So a tunnel system within the Black Sea complex makes a lot of sense. Even if there is no positive threat, he will worry about ‘this situation. ”
A cross section showing the interior of the elevator shaft connecting the two tunnels shows six separate ventilation shafts designed to supply fresh or filtered air to the tunnel occupants.
Multiple ventilation shafts and two separate tunnels may have been designed with chemical attack in mind and layered with redundancies that made it difficult to completely restrict the supply of clean air to the palace. Multiple cable conduits can serve a similar purpose. His two separate portals on the hillside “create secondary and tertiary backups for ventilation,” Gabryszewski said. “In case of any attack, Putin has two sources of air intake: high pressure and low pressure.”
This figure does not show a detailed view of the structures on the east side of the tunnel complex. Given that the tunnels appear to be connected by a road, the eastern building may have been designed as a route for loading supplies into the palace grounds via a hidden elevator. Gabrishevsky highlighted an area that could be used to load and unload supplies near the end of the road, next to the tunnel complex.
A link to the figure has been preserved for posterity in the Wayback Machine Internet Archive and has been used for years among the Moscow subculture known as ‘digger’, urban explorers who visit and record forbidden sites. It was circulated throughout the world and then published in publications. Comprehensive report on the palace Navalny is a Russian opposition politician currently serving a nine-year sentence in a Russian penal colony. The figure was first brought to insider attention by an anonymous excavator who said he belonged to a group called “Sect Ze”. In an email exchange, a spokesperson for the group said it shared the findings because it was “disgusted with Putin’s stupid face and wanted to show his paranoid underground transportation.” In a subsequent video call, he said he was speaking to “bring the end of the regime closer.”
Kimaj, a former State Department official, said Putin’s meticulous preparations more than a decade ago showed how long he had focused on the possibility of an existential conflict with the West. said to show
“In the Ukrainian war there is speech, there is propaganda, there is hyperbole, and there is a performance aspect that affects Russia’s domestic politics. But it is also a deadly reality. We recognize that we are embroiled in a conflict with,” Kimage said. West. The nuclear aspect is an important part of it. He knows he’s standing on top of a volcano. He doesn’t seem psychotic enough to cause a nuclear conflict – he has grandchildren – but he’s stood on the threshold of that for a very long time. These tunnels, this bunker is part of it. ”
Mattatias Schwartz is Insider’s Chief National Security Correspondent. You can contact him by email: schwartz79@protonmail.com.
Anastasia Carrier is a Detroit-based freelance reporter who specializes in Russia, disinformation and current affairs. She holds her Master’s Degree in Journalism from Columbia University and her work has been published in POLITICO, The Wire China and Radcliffe Magazine.