Russia's Secret Nuclear Changes Revealed In ‘Huge' Security Breach
Russia has been undertaking a large-scale modernization of its nuclear missile infrastructure for years, according to leaked classified documents cited in a media investigation.
The German publication Der Spiegel and Danish investigative group Danwatch, said the secret files showed architectural plans, internal layouts, and procurement records for new military installations and the outlets published satellite imagery they say backs up their claims.
The investigation did not clarify to what extent the inner workings of the constructions are as specified by the blueprints.
Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) told Newsweek the documents cited by the outlets appear to be construction blueprints.
Tom Røseth, a Norwegian military expert who saw some of the documents, told Newsweek their revelations represented "a huge breach of security" for Russia.
Newsweek has not independently confirmed the investigation's claims and has contacted Russia's defense ministry for comment.
Russian President Vladimir Putin announced in 2018 the development of new nuclear weapons systems he said would put his country ahead in the arms race with the West.
An investigation that says Russia was also conducting a large-scale modernization of the Russian nuclear weapons complex, which Putin did not mention, will add to concerns about the threat Moscow poses.
This is salient given the boasts by the Kremlin and its propagandists of Russia's atomic arms capabilities since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The investigation released on Wednesday and reported by Ukrainian outlets and BBC Russian, says Danwatch journalists had obtained more than two million documents concerning Russian military contracts, which were analyzed in collaboration with Der Spiegel.
Although Russia tightened laws in 2020 restricting military records, the investigators said they bypassed these measures in 2024 to find blueprints revealing the layout of military sites with strategic nuclear weapons.
The documents are said to reveal the modernization program, including renewing old Soviet-era bases and building other facilities from scratch.
Images showed new barracks, guard towers, command centers, and storage buildings as well as underground tunnels, the journalists said.
They also revealed internal layout of facilities where protective equipment is stored, locations of weapon cabinets and control rooms, and which buildings are connected by underground tunnels, the publications said.
Journalists said the documents included blueprints of Russia's Strategic Missile Forces sites in the city of Yasny in the Orenburg region and detailed floor plans for facilities of the 621st and 368th missile regiments.
The Yasny site is one of 11 locations from which missiles with nuclear warheads can be launched.
The town hosts Russia's Avangard hypersonic glide vehicle, according to the journalists. Experts estimate Russia has about 900 strategic nuclear warheads in underground silos.
Kristensen, from the FAS, told Newsweek the documents appear to be construction blueprints which open a second layer to open-source intelligence and allow experts to combine satellite imagery observations with identified structures in the images.
Røseth, associate professor in intelligence studies at the Norwegian Defence University College, said that while there was a small possibility it could be a disinformation campaign from Russia but the breach "appears to me very credible and the immense scope of it is impressive."
"It reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the system," he told Newsweek Thursday, "and also details of the compounds and the nuclear silos."
Danwatch and Der Spiegel said they had "gained access to hundreds of highly detailed blueprints showing how Russia is carrying out an enormous modernization of some of the world's most sensitive nuclear weapons facilities."
Hans Kristensen, director of the nuclear information project at the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) to Newsweek: "The documents open a second layer to open-source intelligence by allowing us to combine satellite imagery observations with identified structures in the blueprints."
Tom Røseth, associate professor in intelligence studies at the Norwegian Defence University College to Newsweek: "It's nothing new that you have weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the Russian information system that you can access … But these specific details of nuclear sites are of far more importance."
The documents show the extent of Russia's modernization of its strategic nuclear weapons forces is real and will add resonance to any future nuclear threats that Moscow makes.
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Black Americans being used as guinea pigs involved universities
In 1871, Henry D. Schmidt, a New Orleans doctor, 'gifted' the crania of 19 formerly enslaved African American and mixed-race individuals to Dr. Emil Ludwig Schmidt at the University of Leipzig to study the racist hypothesis that a person's morality or intelligence could be determined by crevices and bumps of their skull. A century and a half later, in a presumed act of higher consciousness, the German university no longer felt the need to house the ill-gotten skulls and, on Saturday, the remains of those 19 disregarded souls were given a proper burial in New Orleans. Saturday's event at Dillard University took place on the same week that Harvard University announced that it is relinquishing what are believed to be among the earliest photos of enslaved people in the United States. The 1850 images of a father and daughter known as Renty and Delia, who were photographed naked to the waist, were commissioned by Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz to support the theory of polygenism, the idea that human races evolved separately. Harvard would probably still be clutching those photos if Tamara Lanier, an author who says she's a descendant of the father and daughter pictured, hadn't fought a 15-year legal battle with the university. But the photos won't come to her. Renty and Delia's images will now be placed at the International African American Museum in South Carolina, the state where they were enslaved. As I sat through the three-hour service, which included a city acknowledgement by New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, musical tributes and a riveting performance from Dillard University's Theatre Ensemble personifying the 19 human beings we were paying homage to, I couldn't help but think about the history of Black Americans being the guinea pigs for experimentation or examination or the subject of incomplete theories, under the guise of scientific advancement. Or the irony of racist individuals using 'inferior' Black specimens to interrogate complex ideas about human physiology, and still arriving at racist conclusions even with evidence in their possession that contradicts their hypotheses. We live in a moment where there is a persistent effort to erase all knowledge of these atrocities and pretend as if they were just figments of Black folks' imagination. But Eva Baham, who chaired the Cultural Repatriation Committee that brought the remains of the 19 New Orleanians home, said during Saturday's service that the purpose of studying history is 'to move forward. And when we keep our past hidden, we are starting over every day.' The memorial service for Adam Grant, Isaak Bell, Hiram Smith, William Pierson, Henry Williams, John Brown, Hiram Malone, William Roberts, Alice Brown, Prescilla Hatchet, Marie Louise, Mahala, Samuel Prince, John Tolman, Henry Allen, Moses Willis, Henry Anderson and two other unidentified souls was unlike any other I have witnessed. The decedents had transitioned over a century and a half ago; however, their departure from this realm could not have been considered peaceful before this weekend's ceremony. Roughly 200 community members filled the sanctuary of Dillard's Lawless Memorial Chapel to pay their respects to these ancestors who were so horribly disrespected after they died. 'It was emotionally draining because you're trying your best to make some connections and to search and find [that] there's hope,' Freddi Williams Evans, a member of the Cultural Repatriation Committee, told me. 'We could not verify any descendants. And so we have to step in and be their family.' Harvard is letting go not just of the photos of Renty and Delia, but also images of enslaved people known as Alfred, Delia, Drana, Fassena, Jack and Jem. Lanier, who says she's the great-great-great-granddaughter of 'Papa Renty,' said of the settlement with Harvard, 'This pilfered property, images taken without dignity or consent and used to promote a racist psychoscience will now be repatriated to a home where their stories can be told and their humanity can be restored.' As she spoke Wednesday she locked arms with Susanna Moore, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Agassiz, the Harvard biologist. Moore rightly called the work her forefather was doing with the photos 'a deeply racist project.' The combination of Harvard relinquishing its photos and Dillard receiving the remains of those wrongly shipped to a lab overseas means that even in 2025, we are still unpacking just how much dehumanization defined slavery and its aftermath in the United States. Dillard University President Monique Guillory told me it was important to honor the 19 in New Orleans because 'They walked the streets of New Orleans like we do.' Saturday's ceremony ended with African drumming and dancing, and then attendees were led out of the chapel by a jazz band and a traditional New Orleans second line en route to bury the remains of a tormented people, the right way. This article was originally published on
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Mass Drone Attack On Exposed Russian Bombers Puts Spotlight On Hardened Aircraft Shelter Debate
New details continue to emerge about Ukraine's unprecedented covert drone attacks on multiple Russian air bases, but the full scale and scope of the resulting losses remain unclear. It is the latest global event to put a spotlight on an already fierce debate about whether the U.S. military should be investing in more hardened aircraft shelters and other new fortified infrastructure at bases abroad and at home, something TWZ has been following closely. What we just saw in Russia is a nightmare scenario that we have already been sounding the alarm on for years now, which broadly underscores the growing threats posed by drones. Readers can first get up to speed on what is known about the attacks, which were focused on trying to neutralize Russian strategic bombers that are regularly used to conduct cruise missile attacks on Ukraine, in our latest reporting here. Authorities in Ukraine say they attacked five bases with a total of 117 small and relatively short-range first-person-view (FPV) type kamikaze drones, destroying or at least damaging 41 aircraft. Andriy Kovalenko, an official with Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council, has also said that 'at least 13 Russian aircraft were destroyed.' These claims have yet to be independently verified and they should be taken as speculative at this time. The russian terrorist state no longer has the ability to produce Tu-95s or any kind of strategic bomber. This is a tremendous victory for Ukraine. — Michael MacKay (@mhmck) June 1, 2025 The drones were launched from container-like enclosures built to look like small sheds or tiny homes on tractor-trailer trucks. Questions remain about exactly how they were guided to their targets, but at least some of them were human-in-the-loop guided by operators using first-person-view 'goggles' or tablet-like devices. 5/5. After launching, the trailers self-destructed to avoid detection or recovery (see photos). — Roman Sheremeta (@rshereme) June 2, 2025 From the imagery that has already emerged, a key aspect of the Ukrainian drone attacks was that the Russian planes that were targeted were parked out in the open. The fact that aircraft sitting on open flightlines are especially vulnerable, including to uncrewed aerial threats, is not new. 'One day last week, I had two small UASs that were interfering with operations… At one base, the gate guard watched one fly over the top of the gate check, tracked it while it flew over the flight line for a little while, and then flew back out and left,' now-retired Air Force Gen. James 'Mike' Holmes, then head of Air Combat Command (ACC), said in 2017, now nearly a decade ago. 'Imagine a world where somebody flies a couple hundred of those and flies one down the intake of my F-22s with just a small weapon on it.' At that time, TWZ noted that it would be easier for an adversary to just attack parked planes in the open, offering a way to knock out large numbers of aircraft before they can even get airborne. Since then, we have already had multiple opportunities to re-highlight the ever-growing risk of something like this occurring to America's armed forces, including scenarios involving more localized attacks on bases far from active war zones by lower-end weaponized commercial drones. The Russian military has been acutely aware of drone threats to air bases even before the all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022. A mass drone attack on Russia's Khmeimim Air Base outpost in Syria in 2017 was a watershed moment that TWZ highlighted at the time as a sign of things to come. Regular drone attacks on Khmeimim in the late 2010s also prompted the construction of new hardened aircraft shelters there. Last year, Russia's Minister of Defense Andrey Belousov said that 'a schedule for airfields has already been drawn up and that shelters will definitely be built' in response to Ukrainian drone and missile attacks, according to independent Russian journalist Alexander Kots. The construction of new aircraft shelters, hardened and unhardened, had already been visible in satellite imagery of a growing number of air bases in Russia since late 2023. However, from what has been observed to date, the focus has been on better protecting tactical jets at bases closer to Ukraine. Just recently, Belousov was shown a model of a hangar with a Tu-160 Blackjack bomber inside as part of a presentation on new developments relating to prefabricated and modular structures for various military purposes. Whether or not the hangar model reflects an active project, or is a proposal or notional concept of some kind, is unclear. Tu-160s were among the aircraft types Ukraine explicitly targeted with its covert drone attacks this weekend. Russian Defense Minister Andrei Belousov was shown a model of a hangar for Tu-160 strategic bombers during a visit last — Rob Lee (@RALee85) June 2, 2025 Russia's construction of new aircraft shelters is part of an expanding global trend that has also been observed in China, North Korea, and elsewhere. Hardened Aircraft Shelters of J-10 Fighters — Húrin (@Hurin92) September 8, 2023 Geolocation: 39.4069444, 125.8983333Sunchon AB, DPRK (North Korea)10/27/23 Sentinel-2 L2A pass shows paving and shelters (16 total) completed. Sunchon is home to the KPAAF 57th Air Regiment (MiG-29s).@GeoConfirmedhttps:// — Evergreen Intel (@vcdgf555) December 1, 2023 Satellite imagery of Nasosnaya Air Base – Republic Of Azerbaijan Construction of hangars for JF-17 fighter jets, which began in early 2024, is now in its final stages. The base will soon be ready to host a full squadron of 16 aircraft. — آریان || Āryān (@BasedQizilbash) May 28, 2025 The U.S. military does have hardened aircraft shelters are various bases, but has made very limited investments in building more since the end of the Cold War. Calls for new shelters, hardened or otherwise, have been pointedly absent from U.S. military planning in recent years, at least publicly. Some American officials have actively pushed back on the idea, often citing the cost of building new hardened infrastructure, which is funding that could be applied elsewhere. The U.S. Air Force, for instance, has been more focused on active defenses, such as surface-to-air missile systems, and expanding the number of operating locations that forces could be dispersed to, if necessary. 'So, we will have the need for bases, the main operating bases from which we operate,' Air Force Gen. Kevin Schneider, head of Pacific Air Forces (PACAF), said at the Air & Space Forces Association's (AFA) 2025 Warfare Symposium in March. 'The challenge becomes, at some point, we will need to move to austere locations. We will need to disaggregate the force. We will need to operate out of other locations, again, one for survivability, and two, again, to provide response options.' Those are requirements that 'cost money' and force the Air Force to 'make internal trades,' such as 'do we put that dollar towards, you know, fixing the infrastructure at Kadena [Air Base in Japan] or do we put that dollar towards restoring an airfield at Tinian,' Schneider added. There is growing criticism that U.S. forces are being left increasingly vulnerable, including to drone attacks, by a lack of investment in hardened aircraft shelters and other new fortified facilities. A recent deployment of six of the U.S. Air Force's 19 prized B-2 stealth bombers to the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, which wrapped up earlier this month, had offered a new datapoint in the shelter debate. Diego Garcia only has four specially designed B-2 shelters open, which are not hardened in any way, and the bombers were seen parked out in the open while on the island. More recently, a detachment of F-15E Strike Eagles arrived on the island to help provide force protection to other assets still there. 'While 'active defenses' such as air and missile defense systems are an important part of base and force protection, their high cost and limited numbers mean the U.S. will not be able to deploy enough of them to fully protect our bases,' a group of 13 Republican members of Congress had written in an open letter to the heads of the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy in May 2024. 'In order to complement active defenses and strengthen our bases, we must invest in 'passive defenses,' like hardened aircraft shelters and underground bunkers, dispersal of forces across both within a base and across multiple bases, redundant logistical facilities, and rapid runway repair capabilities.' 'While hardened aircraft shelters do not provide complete protection from missile attacks, they do offer significantly more protection against submunitions than expedient shelters (relocatable steel shelters). They would also force China to use more force to destroy each aircraft, thereby increasing the resources required to attack our forces and, in turn, the survivability of our valuable air assets,' they added. 'Constructing hardened shelters for all our air assets may not be economically feasible or tactically sensible, but the fact that the number of such shelters on U.S. bases in the region has barely changed over a decade is deeply troubling.' In January, the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, D.C., released a report that underscores the points made above about the benefits that new hardened aircraft shelters offer in terms of reducing vulnerability and increasing the resources an enemy would have to expend. The authors of the Hudson report assessed that 10 missiles, each with a warhead capable of scattering cluster munitions across areas 450 feet in diameter, could be enough to neutralize all aircraft parked in the open and critical fuel storage facilities at key airbases like Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in Japan, Naval Support Facility Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, or Langley Air Force Base in Virginia. The general points made here about the particular danger of submunitions from cluster weapons could also apply to drones with similarly sized warheads like the ones Ukraine just used in its attacks on Russia's air bases. Even fully-enclosed, but unhardened shelters could provide a modicum of additional defense against these kinds of threats. Last year, officials at two U.S. air bases – Langley Air Force Base in Virginia and Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina – expressed interest in the possibility of adding nets or other similar physical defensive measures to existing open-ended sunshade-type shelters to help protect against attacks by smaller drones. It's unclear whether there has been any movement since on actual implementation. Nets are among the drone defenses currently used on both sides of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. Waves of still-mysterious drone incursions over Langley Air Force Base in December 2023, which TWZ was the first to report on, remain a particular focal point for broader calls from Congress and elsewhere to better protect U.S. military facilities against uncrewed aerial threats. What happened at Langley is just one of a still-growing number of worrisome drone incidents over and around U.S. military facilities, training ranges, and warships off the coast of the United States, as well as critical civilian infrastructure, in the past decade or so, many of which we have reported first. Overseas bases well outside of established conflict zones that host American forces have been the site of concerning drone overflights in recent years, as well. There was also a flurry of reported drone sightings last year over New Jersey and other parts of the United States last year, many of which quickly turned out to be spurious. However, the surge in public attention underscored a real threat, as Ukraine has now demonstrated in dramatic fashion. While Ukraine says its covert drone attacks on Russia took more than a year to plan, prepare for, and stage, they also underscore how the basic barriers to entry for carrying out drone attacks, especially ones involving weaponized commercial designs, have long been low in terms of cost and technical aptitude. The operation notably leveraged ArduPilot, described as an 'open source autopilot system' that is freely available online. Of course open source software has been used in war before, but seeing ArduPilot Mission Planner being used to blow up Russian strategic bombers is still wild. — John Wiseman (@ 2025-06-01T15:55:48.877Z Additional footage shows another FPV drone overflying the airfield; multiple Tupolev Tu-95 bombers are seen aflame. — Jimmy Rushton (@JimmySecUK) June 1, 2025 18 years after @Jrdmnz @jason4short and I created ArduPilot, here it is destroying large parts of the Russian air force. Crazy — Chris Anderson (@chr1sa) June 1, 2025 Drone threats are only to expand and accelerate in terms of sophistication, thanks in large part to advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, as time goes on. Uncrewed aerial systems with rapidly improving autonomous navigation and targeting capabilities that do not require a human in the loop present particularly serious threats. Without the need for an active link to a human operator, those drones are immune to jamming and do not pump out radio emissions that can help provide early warning to defenders. They are also not limited in range to keep a connection with their controllers. Improving capabilities to autonomously find and prosecute targets are already emerging on one-way-attack drones, and this is something that can be expected to proliferate, as well. Autonomous drones that can target objects dynamic targeting without having to rely just on a fixed set of coordinates via satellite navigation like GPS, another signal that can be disrupted, will only make drone threats more complex and vastly harder to counter overall. TWZ has explored all of this in great detail in this past feature. Swarming is another area that will make lower-end drones so much harder to defeat. Working cooperatively as an integrated team at computer speeds allows drones to operate and react with extreme efficiency beyond the pace of the enemy's decision cycle. This, along with sheer mass and the resilience that goes with that, can quickly overwhelm defenses. 'In general, the technology to field systems has far outpaced the technology to defeat those systems,' Rear Adm. Paul Spedero, Vice Director for Operations, J3, Joint Chiefs of Staff, told members of the House Oversight Committee at a hearing on drone threats in April. 'It's a much wider, broader, deeper market for drone application, for commercial and recreational purposes, so hence that technology has evolved very quickly from radio control drones to now fully autonomous drones that may or may not even rely on reception of a GPS signal, which would make it very challenging to intercept.' Ukraine's covert drone attacks on Russia also underscore that these are increasingly threats unbounded by basic geography. An adversary could launch uncrewed aerial attackers from 1,000 miles away or from an area right next to the target, or anywhere in between. There are many drone types that can address those missions needs, and affordably so. Those drones could be launched from the ground, from ships at sea, and/or from aerial platforms, including other lower-end drones. Complex attacks involving different tiers of threats approaching from multiple vectors at once only add to the complications for defending forces. Ukrainian "Dovbush" UAV carrying and releasing two FPV drones during "Dovbush" UAV is reportedly capable of carrying up to six FPV drones at the same — Status-6 (Military & Conflict News) (BlueSky too) (@Archer83Able) November 19, 2024 Despite all this, America's armed forces have also continued to lag in the fielding of counter-drone defenses for forces down-range, as well as bases and other assets in and around the homeland. Domestically, an often convoluted array of legal, regulatory, and other factors have presented challenges. On the sidelines of a U.S. military counter-drone experiment called Falcon Peak 2025 in October 2024, TWZ and other outlets were notably told that lasers, microwaves, surface-to-air missiles, and guns were all off the table as options for neutralizing drones within the United States, at least at the time. For over a decade I have outlined the exact scenario as we just saw in Russia. It could happen in the U.S. tomorrow. This was a pivotal event. U.S. military and political leadership cannot live in partial denial of this threat anymore. Our most prized aircraft are sitting ducks. — Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) June 1, 2025 The biggest challenge with this issue is education. Many just don't take the time to learn the ins and outs of the UAS threat, there are many layers and nuances, emerging technologies. There are high up people in the military that don't even really understand these basics. Then… — Tyler Rogoway (@Aviation_Intel) June 1, 2025 The U.S. military does continue to push for enhancements to the authorities it has now to protect its bases and other assets domestically against drone threats. As part of a new Pentagon-wide counter-drone strategy rolled out last year, U.S. Northern Command (NORTHCOM) has a 'synchronizer role' that includes making sure commanders know what they are allowed to do now if drones appear around their facilities. Ukraine's drone attacks on Russian air bases this past weekend can only add to the already intense debate over investments in hardened aircraft shelters and other fortified infrastructure, as well as fuel calls for new counter-drone defenses, in general. The stark reality of what Ukrainian intelligence services have now demonstrated makes clear that uncrewed aerial threats, including to key assets deep inside a country's national territory, are well past the point of something that can be ignored. Contact the author: joe@
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Russia admits to taking Ukrainian children during latest peace talks, Zelensky says
President Volodymyr Zelensky said that during the Istanbul negotiations, Russian representatives dismissed the issue of abducted Ukrainian children as a "show for childless European old ladies" and acknowledged deporting several hundred children. "I want our journalists, our people — and not only ours — to understand their attitude toward the humanitarian aspect. First, they told us not to 'put on a show for childless European old ladies' — that's how they phrased it in Russian. That's their attitude when we raise the issue of the children," Zelensky noted during an online press conference attended by the Kyiv Independent. During the second round of peace talks in Istanbul on June 2, Vladimir Medinsky, aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin and head of Russia's delegation, presented a list submitted by Ukraine containing the names of 339 children it says were abducted by Russia and must be returned. Medinsky rejected the allegations, denying that Russia had taken the children by force. Ukraine has documented over 19,500 cases of children who were forcibly taken to Russia, Belarus, or occupied territories since the beginning of the full-scale invasion in February 2022. According to official figures, only about 1,300 of them have been brought back to areas under Ukrainian control. These actions have faced widespread international backlash. In March 2023, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Putin and the country's commissioner for children's rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, over their alleged roles in organizing the deportations. More recently, the European Parliament passed a resolution denouncing the deportations as part of a "genocidal strategy" to eliminate Ukrainian identity, calling for the immediate and unconditional return of all abducted children. "We told them they had stolen 20,000 children, and they responded that it wasn't 20,000 — at most, they said, it was a matter of a few hundred," Zelensky said. "Our delegation (was) offended by this... Honestly, I'm not. I think it's more important not to fixate on the number, but on the fact itself — they admitted to taking children. We believe it's thousands, they say it's hundreds, but what matters is that they acknowledged the fact." Read also: 'Closer to victory' – Operation Spiderweb gives much-needed morale boost to Ukrainians after 3 years of full-scale war We've been working hard to bring you independent, locally-sourced news from Ukraine. Consider supporting the Kyiv Independent.
