Russia has stripped much of the air defense from its far-north bases, satellite imagery sourced by RFE/RL shows. Some units appear to have shifted toward areas Ukraine's drones can now reach. One analyst ties the shift to a war that forces Moscow to guard more ground with fewer launchers and crews.

Russia's Arctic missile sites emptied out

Around the Rogachevo air base on Russia's Novaya Zemlya islands, most air-defense equipment has disappeared from a missile site operating there since at least August 2015. A 6 July image records the change. Launchers and radars stood there in September 2019. By this July, the site read close to bare.

The submarine city lost much of its shield

In Severodvinsk, on the White Sea, Russia builds and repairs its nuclear submarines. Several decades-old air-defense positions around the city now appear vacant. Satellite images show roughly 24 S-300 and S-400 launchers gone from specialized positions around the city.

At least some of the missing launchers appear to have been redeployed. New batteries have appeared beside likelier targets. 

By the Saratov refinery in Russia's southwest, an empty field filled with launch vehicles, their tubes raised. Drones have struck that refinery repeatedly since early 2025. In Moscow, crews have seized park land in the capital to host S-400 batteries these past weeks.

Open-source investigations estimate that about 60% of Russia's S-300 and S-400 systems have left their pre-2022 positions. Air defense has mostly stayed around the country's nuclear silos and its long-range bomber bases.

A professor at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, Katarzyna Zysk, reads the far-north drawdown as "a growing mismatch between the targets Russia must protect and its available launchers, interceptors, and trained personnel." The pullback suggests Moscow sees no big strike coming against the far north, and judges it can cut protection there without unacceptable risk.

Russia is enlarging launch pads at the occupied Donetsk International Airport for its jet-powered Geran-3 drones. Satellite imagery analyzed by the Telegram channel "Strategic Aviation" shows that the size of standard launch pads has increased to accommodate Geran-3 launches, and new access roads were added to the Geran/Gerbera drone warehouse in June.

The construction extends Russia's ongoing conversion of the occupied airport into a full drone launch and storage complex, following the satellite-confirmed initial conversion that began in mid-2025.

Donetsk Airport and Russia's Tsymbulova training ground in Oryol Oblast are the only two known launch sites for Russia's jet-powered Geran-3 and Geran-4 drones.

Ukraine's 1st Separate Unmanned Systems Center claimed in June 2026 that sustained drone strikes had brought the airport under "fire control" and rendered it unusable for Russian operations. The new satellite analysis indicates that Russia continues to make industrial-scale investments there regardless of the operation.

New Geran-3 launch pads, warehouse access roads, second storage building

The Strategic Aviation analysis flagged three specific developments visible in satellite imagery as of 29 June 2026:

1. The enlargement of standard launch pads to accommodate the larger Geran-3 airframe,
2. The completion in June of several access roads leading to the Geran/Gerbera drone warehouse,
3. The likely start of construction on a second warehouse in the central airport section, per the channel.

The Geran-3 uses a turbojet engine and cruises at 300-370 km/h with a range of up to 1,000 km. Its increased size requires launch installations larger than those used for the original gasoline-powered Geran-2.

Russia completed preparations for mass production of the Geran-4 by January 2026, with test launches from the Primorsk drone airport in Oryol Oblast and from Donetsk Airport. 

From the "Cyborg" stand to a Russian drone base

Donetsk Airport was the site of one of the most iconic Ukrainian defensive stands of the war — the 242-day "Cyborg" defense of 2014-2015, when Ukrainian forces held the airport's terminal buildings against Russian-led forces. Russia captured the site in early 2015 and has held it since.

Until 2024, the airport lay effectively at the line of contact, preventing large-scale Russian construction. As the front moved westward in 2024, Russia gained enough rear-area depth to begin converting the site into a drone launch base.

Russia's most-used map service has quietly painted over scores of sensitive sites near its northwestern border, and in doing so showed where they sit, according to Militarnyi. A joint Nordic-Baltic team of reporters counted the blurred spots and traced most of them to Russia's military and arms industry. The cover-up only began after Ukrainian drones started reaching deep inside the country.

A map that hides and reveals at once

The Swedish outlet SVT Verifierar found that Yandex, Russia's main online map service, has blurred 119 objects near the western border. It ran the investigation with Denmark's DR, Norway's NRK, and the Baltic outlet Delfi. The Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi reported the count.

The blurring is new. As recently as 2018, Yandex showed no pixelated patches inside Russia at all. Experts point to a "Streisand effect," the way an attempt at censorship can draw even more attention to a place than leaving it alone would.

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What the blurs cover

Reporters sorted the 119 sites into clear groups, and the largest tie straight to Russia's war machine:

• 31 linked to the defense industry, repair, and research
• 29 air bases
• 16 air-defense, radar, and communications sites
• 12 naval bases, shipyards, and repair yards
• 11 logistics, fuel, and ammunition sites
• 6 garrisons and training grounds
• 4 nuclear-weapons sites
• 4 space-activity sites
• 3 nuclear power plants or nuclear-energy research sites
• 3 military sites of unknown purpose

One of the clearest examples is the Yantar shipbuilding plant in Kaliningrad Oblast, reduced to a gray smear on Yandex.

Why the smudges appeared

The blurring traces back to Ukraine's deep-strike campaign. In December 2024, a Moscow court ordered Yandex to mask the Ryazan oil refinery after Ukraine struck it several times. A supervisory agency told the court that open map data exposed a strategically important site, and the court agreed the exposure undermined Russia's defense and slowed military supply.

A nuclear-weapons expert, Matt Korda, told the reporters the censorship was not worth the effort. Analysts can get around it through other imagery providers, he said, and adversaries can watch the same sites with their own military satellites.

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A wider buildup behind the border

The blurred sites cluster where Russia faces its Nordic and Baltic NATO neighbors. Intelligence services in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland warn that Russia's expanding bases along the Nordic and Baltic frontier could pull the alliance and Russia into a dangerous standoff. Danish sources see signs of preparation for a possible large-scale conflict in the Baltic Sea region.

Senior officers say any first fighting could start near Denmark or the Baltic states. No firm Russian decision to attack exists, the sources stress, but the groundwork is underway. A separate satellite study found Russia building new sites for up to 115,000 troops along that border, and reviving Soviet-era garrisons near Finland.