Vladimir Putin had a massive underground lair built beneath his secret palace by the Black Sea, according to plans posted online by the engineering firm behind the project.
The Russian president was said to have ordered the construction of tunnels, which lie about 50 metres below the surface, out of concern for his survival in the event of a revolution or war.
The underground complex was built before Russia seized control of Crimea in 2014, when Putin was still cultivating warm relations with European powers.
His £1 billion palace – complete with its own church, ice rink, casino and hookah lounge – stretches across 190,000 square feet on a verge overlooking the sea.
The existence of the tunnels, first reported by Business Insider, is only known about because the defunct Russian construction firm that built them posted diagrams online as proof of the excellence of their work.
Metro Style, an engineering company hired to dig tunnels for the Moscow underground, published the images on its website in the early 2010s, describing the project as an “underground complex for a resort” in Gelendzhik, the town closest to Putin’s palace.
The diagrams reveal bunkers with their own ventilation system, as well as sewage and fresh water supply.
Reinforcing the walls are 15-inch concrete shells and the entire underground complex spans 6,500 square feet.
An elevator shaft connects the complex to the two tunnels, with the lower one featuring a walkway to the beach, according to one of Metro Style’s diagrams.
The lower tunnel has cable racks that could be used to carry electricity, lighting and fibre-optic cables into a command post.
Exits from both tunnels are visible on the cliff face rising up from the sea to the palace.
Online ‘diggers’
Although the diagrams were removed from Metro Style’s website in 2016, they were still visible on the Wayback Machine, an archive of online content.
They were circulated in a community of so-called ‘diggers’ – Russian citizens who visit and document forbidden sites.
An anonymous digger who said he belonged to a group called “Sect Z” told Business Insider that he was sharing the images “because we are tired of Putin’s stupid face and want to show his paranoid underground transport”.
He later told Business Insider that he hoped the images would hasten the “end of the regime” .
Thousands of Russians took to the streets when the organisation of opposition leader Alexei Navalny first published an expose of Putin’s Black Sea palace in 2021.
Some held up gold-painted toilet brushes in reference to a £700 utensil reportedly found in the colossal residence.
The president has denied owning the palace, which is surrounded by 17,000 acres of woods and permanently protected by his security team.
Shortly after Mr Navalny’s investigation, Arkady Rotenberg, a billionaire childhood friend of Mr Putin, came out to claim the property belonged to him and the president had nothing to do with it.
But the Kremlin failed to explain why the palace is under 24-hour guard by state security forces and protected by a no-fly zone if the president does not live there.
Several media outlets spoke to unnamed builders at the time, who said they had worked on the site and recalled its lavish interior.
Georgy Alburov, one of Mr Navalny’s allies who worked on the team’s investigation, told an exiled Russian YouTube show on Thursday that the team had seen the plans for the underground bunker but did not give them enough attention.
“You can live there. There is sewage, amenities, very sturdy walls,” he said on Alexander Plushchev’s show on Thursday.
“It’s a fully fledged bunker you can hide in.”
Safe evacuation route
However, Mark Galeotti, author of ‘Putin’s Wars: From Crimea to Ukraine’, told The Telegraph that the underground complex appeared to be more about providing the head of the state with a convenient and safe evacuation route rather than a place to live during a nuclear attack.
“These tunnels are not bunkers. For it to be properly secure you have to be able to close it off,” he said, pointing to ordinary doors at the end of the tunnels on the beach side.
Mr Galeotti compared the structure with a series of top-secret tunnels beneath Moscow, known as Metro-2, that were designed to evacuate the Soviet leadership in case of an attack. “I have a suspicion that’s what we’re talking about here,” he said.
The moving walkway in one of the tunnels suggests that it was going to be used as another luxury feature of this opulent estate.
“The whole Gelendzhik palace is a monument to excessive luxury – with everything else you’ve got, why shouldn’t you have a travelator to take you to the beach?” said Mr Galeotti.
He added that if the underground complex had been designed as an emergency shelter, the plans and construction would have been handled by a special branch of the Kremlin administration that typically deals with top-secret projects, not an obscure Moscow-based contractor that ended up publishing the architectural plans online.