Vladimir Putin has built a massive 34-mile ring of 50 air defence missile towers to shield his luxury lakeside lair from Ukrainian drone strikes
Paranoid warmonger Vladimir Putin has surrounded his lavish holiday palace with a ring of steel to stop Ukrainian kamikaze drones from blowing him out of bed. The Kremlin despot has rushed to erect 16 brand-new anti-aircraft towers just south of his palatial Valdai hideaway.
The custom-built platforms are designed to hoist deadly Pantsir and Tor surface-to-air missile batteries into the sky – Moscow’s gold standard for swatting away low-altitude drones before they can strike.
The massive missile ring stretches across a 34-mile arc, cutting right past a military airstrip at Khotilovo and a mystery biological lab sitting on isolated Lysiachyi Island.
It means the surrounding district now has at least 50 high-tech air defence sites guarding fewer than 100,000 locals.
In contrast, the 20 million ordinary Russians living in and around the capital, Moscow, are left to share roughly 100 batteries between them.
The brazen military build-up was uncovered by hawk-eyed open-source intelligence researcher jembobineuse on X and journalists at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, who spotted the newly constructed towers after combing through high-res satellite images.
The lakeside bunker, tucked neatly onto a secluded peninsula between Lake Valdai and Lake Uzhin, reportedly serves as a high-security love nest for Putin, 74, and his long-rumoured gymnast squeeze Alina Kabaeva, 43, alongside their two secret sons.
The bunker is said to be kitted out with mind-boggling luxuries to keep the Russian strongman living like an emperor while his troops freeze in the trenches.
The sprawling compound features high-tech “eternal youth” contraptions, including a sub-zero cryo-chamber and personal solarium.
It also has a lavish Turkish hammam, a therapeutic mud room and private medical suites on standby around the clock.
The cunning dictator is even understood to have had an identical, carbon-copy clone of his official Moscow Kremlin office built inside the luxury compound.
The devious decoy setup allows him to film official televised addresses and dial into video summits without letting the outside world know he is hiding hundreds of miles away by the water.