Russia's sinister doomsday radio bursts into life days before Trump-Putin summit
Russia's 'Doomsday Radio', a lonely rusted radio station in a forest north of Moscow, has woken up.
UVB-76, used during the height of the Cold War by the KGB, has for decades been sputtering bizarre beeps and cryptic gobbledygook.
The short-wave station broadcast the words, 'schesolub', 'druzhnost', 'kener', 'ryushny', 'dzhinochili' and 'lyukospas' yesterday.
According to a Telegram account that monitors the station, it also bleeped: 'ZHTI 12687 TOLKOSRAM 9585 4510.'
The transmission lasted one minute and 12 seconds, the account, UVB-76 logs, said.
Telegram channel Militarist said the message was similar to one broadcast in the first 10 days of January 2022, just before Russia launched its war against Ukraine.
It comes only days ahead of US President Donald Trump's high-stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
In a rambling news conference on Monday, Trump said he planned to hash out with the Russian president 'land swaps' in a bid to end the Ukraine war.
'I'm going to Russia on Friday,' Trump told reporters. Alaska has not been a part of Russia since 1897.
UVB-76, in a military zone classified in Povarovo, goes by many names.
For at least the decade leading up to 1992, it broadcast almost nothing but beeps before switching to buzzes, about 34 per minute, giving it the nickname 'The Buzzer'.
The station sporadically emits garbled audio messages, which tend to peak around 1pm, which can include Russian names.
In 2001, the station broadcast in Russian: 'I am 143. Not receiving the generator [oscillator]… that stuff comes from hardware room.'
Crackly French conversations have also been signalled, as have popular songs like Ganhgam Style by K-pop star Psy.
Observers say these strange words likely covert military orders, such as for the Kremlin to push the 'dead man's switch', to trigger a nuclear attack. More Trending
This has given the monotone outpost the nicknames 'Dead Hand Radio' or 'Judgement Day Radio'.
But officials have never disclosed what the radio's purpose is exactly.
Roskomnadzor, Russia's censor-loving telecommunications regulator, only publicly acknowledged its existence in June.
The agency told RT that information about the 'user of the radio frequency spectrum… is not publicly available'.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
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