Putin's $74M Private Train 'Sacrificed' Security For Luxury Trimmings
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We’re all used to seeing images of U.S. president Joe Biden clambering in and out of Air Force One, but we don’t often see him traveling the country by rail. It’s the same story for most world leaders, who travel the globe in dedicated aircraft to all manner of important meetings. But there is one leader that appears to prefer train travel, and that’s Russian leader Vladimir Putin who has reportedly taken to traveling Russia via private train following his invasion of Ukraine.
Vladimir Putin seen spotting Russia’s best trains.
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“While the train is exclusively for Putin, the president doesn’t travel alone. ‘Dozens of employees’ from the FSO ‘are engaged in the train on a daily basis, who are responsible for the protection of the president and special communication,’ the Dossier Center wrote.
“To accommodate the needs of security staff, as well as possible Kremlin officials and private guests, the train has 22 cars in total, according to the report. However, it said only about 10 cars are usually used at a time.”
To uncover the secrets of Putin’s private train, CNN, the Dossier Center, German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, and the German broadcasters Westdeutscher Rundfunk and Norddeutscher Rundfunk trawled countless documents about its construction. The documents came from Russia’s Federal Guard Service (FSO), Russian Railways, and other government sources.
Реальные фото из бронепоезда Путина | Досье
Through its investigations, the publications found that security and secrecy “was neglected in the construction of the train.”
“We discovered a complete list of the train’s cars in the public domain,” Ilia Rozhdestvenskii, a journalist who wrote the report for the Dossier Center, told Newsweek. “The armor on the train does not provide protection against serious threats; it only guards against gunfire.”
What’s more, the investigators found that the communication systems were “hopelessly outdated,” and that security had been “sacrificed” to make way for Putin’s creature comforts.
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