Putin’s Phantom Palaces: Concealing the Location of Power

One of the most curious aspects of Vladimir Putin’s presidency is the obsession with secrecy surrounding his whereabouts. Unlike leaders in open societies, whose schedules are published and movements visible, Putin shrouds himself in uncertainty, employing a system of duplicate offices, delayed broadcasts and decoy logistics to keep both adversaries and his own subordinates guessing. This theatre of concealment reveals much about the Kremlin’s political culture and the insecurities of an ageing autocrat.

A network of look-alike rooms

From late 2020 onwards, independent Russian and Western reporting pointed to near-identical presidential offices at multiple residences, notably the Kremlin/Novo-Ogaryovo near Moscow and the Black Sea resort of Sochi, designed and dressed to be indistinguishable on camera. The Kremlin publicly denied the existence of “identical offices”, but the denial itself underscored how sensitive the subject had become. 

In 2023, the picture sharpened when Gleb Karakulov—a long-serving engineer-captain in the Federal Guard Service who defected—described replicas of Putin’s working rooms, explaining that the interiors were duplicated so television footage would not reveal the President’s true location. His account, published via the Dossier Center and picked up by major outlets, aligns with years of visual forensics by journalists who noted recurring, interchangeable backdrops in state videos. 

Pre-recorded appearances and time-shifting

The practical corollary of identical sets is pre-recording: meetings are often filmed in advance and released with delays, severing any link between what appears on screen and where the President actually is. Russian and exile media have repeatedly documented such time-shifted broadcasts, a habit that became particularly pronounced during the pandemic and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when physical security and deception converged. The Kremlin’s blanket denial in 2020 sits awkwardly beside this subsequent, consistent pattern of practice. 

Bunkers, rail spurs, and the armoured train

The office replicas are only the visible stagecraft. Underneath lies a logistics system built for invisibility. Investigations by Proekt and others have shown the construction, after 2014 and accelerating post-2022, of private railway spurs and discreet stations abutting key presidential residences—from Novo-Ogaryovo to Sochi and the Valdai compound—enabling movement without reliance on public airports. Parallel reporting details Putin’s preference for an armoured train camouflaged to resemble an ordinary Russian Railways service, further complicating tracking. 

The logic is straightforward. Rail corridors are harder to surveil in real time than air movements, and bespoke sidings into fenced compounds eliminate the public footprints that accompany motorcades or airport protocols. When coupled with pre-recorded meetings set in indistinguishable rooms, the railway network turns the presidency into a moving black box. 

Construction tells and the Novo-Ogaryovo complex

Open-source scrutiny has also tracked telling bursts of construction at presidential sites. MBX Media’s work (covered by Meduza) has documented a vast building programme at Novo-Ogaryovo beginning in 2020, consistent with both security hardening and interior refits—precisely the sort of works one would expect if offices were being rebuilt or cloned for on-camera interchangeability. While the Kremlin dismisses such inferences, the timing and scale are suggestive. 

Why keep even senior officials guessing

The conceit is not aimed solely at foreign services. In a hyper-personalist system, uncertainty is a tool of rule. Ministers and governors summoned at short notice do not know whether they will face the President in Moscow, Sochi, Valdai—or only on a screen. That unpredictability impedes court politics anchored to physical proximity and frustrates any would-be plotter who relies upon patterns of movement. It also entrenches information asymmetries: if few are physically present, fewer still can contradict curated briefings.

The costs of permanent concealment

The secrecy exacts institutional costs. Genuine deliberation is compressed into choreographed encounters; misreporting flourishes because subordinates optimise for presidential mood rather than truth; allies and adversaries alike struggle to assess the state of decision-making in moments of crisis. Moreover the very techniques intended to project invulnerability routinely backfire, fuelling rumours about the President’s health and whereabouts precisely because every public scene looks the same and arrives out of time.

Corruption, palaces, and the stagecraft of power

The duplications in Putin’s working environments mirror the duplications of Russia’s political economy. The same investigative networks that documented the secret railways and cloned interiors also exposed the scale of privileged compounds and their constant refurbishment—from the Gelendzhik palace to the Valdai estate. Whatever one makes of ownership disputes, the material record of secluded, ever-expanding sites is undeniable, and it dovetails with a leadership style that governs through distance and spectacle. 

What the record now shows

Taken together, the best available evidence supports three firm propositions. First, there is a deliberate policy to make filmed workspaces indistinguishable, confirmed by a credible insider and consistent with long-observed broadcast practices. Second, there exists a bespoke mobility architecture—private sidings and a camouflaged armoured train—that reduces external visibility of presidential movements. Third, the Kremlin’s blanket denials have not been matched by falsifying detail, whereas independent reporting has accumulated dates, maps, corporate records, and satellite imagery. The pattern is coherent. 

The paradox of omnipresence

Putin’s multiple identical offices epitomise the paradox of his rule. He aspires to appear omnipresent and eternal, yet in reality he has become elusive, spectral, almost ghostlike—everywhere and nowhere at once. In democratic states, leaders are strongest when most accessible. In Putin’s Russia, strength is projected through concealment, and secrecy itself becomes the architecture of control. But the phantoms of power cannot substitute for governance. A state whose ruler hides behind staged sets and private sidings may project fear, but she cannot project trust.