The Kremlin has dramatically increased the personal security around President Vladimir Putin, installing surveillance systems in the homes of close staffers as part of new measures prompted by a wave of assassinations of top Russian military figures and fears of a coup, according to a report from a European intelligence agency obtained by CNN.
Cooks, bodyguards and photographers who work with the president are also banned from traveling on public transport, the dossier says. Visitors to the Kremlin chief must be screened twice, and those working close to him can only use phones without internet access, it adds.
He has not visited a military facility this year so far, the report says, despite regular trips in 2025. To get around these restrictions, the Kremlin releases pre-recorded images of him to the public, the report adds.
Since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin also spends weeks at a time in upgraded bunkers, often in Krasnodar, a coastal region bordering the Black Sea hours away from Moscow, the report says.
The dossier, released to CNN and other media outlets by a source close to a European intelligence agency, comes at a time of a growing perceived crisis around the Kremlin, four years into its brutal and ill-fated war.
Some of the measures were put in place in recent months in the wake of the killing of a top general in December, which sparked a dispute in the top ranks of Russia’s security establishment, the report says. They suggest mounting unease within the Kremlin as it faces growing problems at home and abroad, including economic woes, increasing signs of dissent and setbacks on the battlefield in Ukraine.
Russian security officials have drastically reduced the number of locations that Putin regularly visits, the report says. He and his family have stopped going to their usual residences in the Moscow region and at Valdai, the president’s secluded summer property which lies between St. Petersburg and the capital.
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