Jens Asbjørn Bøgen
16 of the total 50 towers have been raised in recent weeks.
Russian President Vladimir Putin’s private residence at Valdai, a lakeside compound roughly midway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, is now encircled by about 50 short-range air defense towers, with 16 of them raised in recent weeks.
The count comes from a satellite-image investigation by journalist Mark Krutov of Radio Svoboda, the Russian-language service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
The build-up means the compound is now shielded by roughly half as many anti-aircraft positions as Moscow and its outskirts, which the same analysis counts at about 98. Nationwide, Russia operates about 177 of these towers in total. More than a quarter of that entire network now sits within a 50-kilometer radius of a single presidential estate.
A new ring facing Ukraine
The new structures are built to carry Pantsir or Tor surface-to-air missile systems, and they cluster to the south of the residence, the side that faces Ukraine, Radio Svoboda reported. The outer belt also wraps around a new laboratory complex on Lisiy Island that RFE/RL investigators have tied to Russia’s biological weapons program.
One position in the outer ring was raised earlier, in March 2026, on the grounds of the Khotilovo military airfield. Khotilovo is linked to the Valdai estate by a dedicated railway spur that lets the president travel between the two by train, according to Radio Svoboda.
The underlying tower counts come from an open-source intelligence analyst who posts on X as @jembobineuse. In a post embedded by the Kyiv Independent, he wrote: “A new air defense ring of ~16 SHORAD towers so far, was constructed in September. The total number of towers for the protection of Valdai is now 49 or 50.”
He added that the newest towers are “not yet confirmed.”
From one battery to a fortress in three years
The pace of the build-up tells its own story. The first air defense position near Valdai was spotted in January 2023, and the second only in July 2024. By April 2026, Radio Svoboda had mapped 27 positions around the estate, nearly all of them Pantsir-S1 systems. Six months on, the figure has almost doubled.
The context for the acceleration is Russia’s own account of what it has been fending off. Russian officials claimed that more than 90 Ukrainian drones struck targets in the Valdai area on December 29, 2025. Ukraine denied launching such a strike at Putin’s residence, and the CIA assessed the actual target to be an unspecified military facility elsewhere in the Novgorod region, Radio Svoboda noted.
Krutov’s investigation is based on satellite imagery dated September 29, 2026. It places the newest towers along the shoreline of the Vyshny Volochyok Reservoir, outside the previous defensive perimeter.
