Sloppy Security Resulted in Details of Russia’s Strategic Nuclear Weapon Modernization Program Being Publicly Accessible
May 30th, 2025Via: Danwatch:
Now Danwatch, in collaboration with German Der Spiegel, can for the first time reveal previously unknown details about the enormous upgrade of the military infrastructure at Russia’s most protected facilities.
Together we have analyzed more than two million documents relating to Russian military procurement that Danwatch systematically retrieved from a public database over a period of many months. The Russian authorities have gradually restricted access to the database, but we managed to circumvent these restrictions by using a veriety of digital techniques, including a network of servers located in Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus.
The documents reveal how numerous new facilities have been built across all of Russia: Entire bases have been almost leveled and rebuilt from the ground up; hundreds of new barracks, watchtowers, control centers and storage buildings have been erected; and several kilometers of underground tunnels have been excavated.
The level of detail in the material is now causing several experts to raise alarms about a Russian security breach that could potentially make the large new nuclear weapons bases vulnerable to attack.
Among the millions of documents, Danwatch has found hundreds of original blueprints of the Strategic Missile Forces’ bases near the small town of Yasny, that have since 2019 been equipped with the Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle – one of Russia’s new nuclear delivery systems that plays a central role in President Putin’s ambitions to put Russian in front in an arms race against the West.
In collaboration with Der Spiegel, we can now tell how the documents reveal highly sensitive details about some of the world’s most sensitive facilities.
