Alabuga drone plant ringed by 33 air defence sites

TLDR

• Radio Svoboda says satellite imagery from 21 October shows 33 air defence positions around the Alabuga drone plant.¹²
• It says concrete towers and Pantsir or Tor platforms have been built there since spring 2026.¹
• Ukrainian drones last reached Alabuga in June 2025; a separate institute report tracked net-tower building from May.¹³

Radio Svoboda, the Russian-language service of RFE/RL, says a satellite image from 21 October shows the number of air defence positions around the Alabuga Special Economic Zone in Tatarstan has reached 33.¹²

Why it matters: Alabuga is Russia's main production site for Geran (Shahed-type) strike drones, so a running count of its protection is a trackable indicator, and Svoboda says it published an interactive map of the positions that investigators can check against their own imagery.¹²

Driving the news:

• Since spring 2026, Svoboda says, several concrete towers for air defence systems and new podiums for Pantsir or Tor systems have been built around the zone.¹
• Towers for heavy anti-aircraft machine guns and frames for anti-drone nets over production buildings stand inside the complex.¹²
• Svoboda says Alabuga is now among the best protected sites in Russia against drones, alongside Putin's Valdai residence, with 31 towers and two S-300/S-400 positions.¹

By the numbers:

• 33 air defence positions around the zone, per Svoboda.¹
• More than 100 new air defence positions built in Moscow and its region since the full-scale invasion, per Svoboda.¹

The big picture: Alabuga's protection has been growing since at least May. The Institute for Science and International Security said on 30 August that Vantor and Airbus images from July and August showed lattice towers in two rings, with construction starting around 18 May, probably to carry a cable net against missiles and drones.³ The NZZ, using Vantor images from 22 August and 2 September, estimated from shadows that some masts exceed 60 metres and said the build-out was not finished.⁴ Svoboda says Ukrainian drones last reached the site in June 2025.¹

The other side: Svoboda does not name its imagery provider or say how it counted a "position", so the figure of 33 cannot be reproduced from the text alone. Its concrete towers and Pantsir or Tor podiums are not the same structures as the lattice masts the Institute and the NZZ describe, so the three analyses are not a like-for-like count.¹³⁴

Single-source note: the count of 33 comes from Radio Svoboda alone. UNITED24 Media restates it and no independent imagery analysis of 21 October was found.¹²