Putin's $74M Private Train 'Sacrificed' Security For Luxury Trimmings

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.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in March 2022, the country’s leader has reportedly elected to travel between official meetings by train, rather than taking to the skies in a private jet. But Putin doesn’t hop aboard a Russian Railways passenger train. Instead, he has his own state-run private train, which reportedly cost Russia’s taxpayers more than $74 million.

Now, a new report from CNN and the Dossier Center has uncovered details of what it’s like inside Putin’s private train, and it really is quite something. The train, which was reportedly purchased for 6.8 billion rubles, contains everything from a gym and Turkish steam bath, to a cinema and even a cosmetologist’s office.

Newsweek reports that the train, which is operated by a company called Zircon Service, also includes carriages filled with essential healthcare equipment, including a ventilator and defibrillator. The site explains:

“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.