Russia reportedly buries its drone factory underground

Russia has begun building underground production space for its Shahed and Geran attack drones at the Alabuga industrial zone in Tatarstan, according to Ukrainian open-source intelligence analyst Dnipro Osint, who estimated roughly 42,000 square meters of underground area has already been constructed there.

Dnipro Osint said the shift underground appears to have followed earlier Ukrainian strikes on the Alabuga site, and that Russia has been expanding the underground infrastructure quickly since then.

The analyst placed the activity at coordinates 55.808719°, 52.026664°, within the broader Alabuga Special Economic Zone near the city of Yelabuga, roughly 1,200 km (750 miles) from the Ukrainian border. This specific underground construction claim comes from a single open-source analyst and has not yet been independently confirmed through separate satellite imagery analysis.

Alabuga is Russia’s primary production site for the Geran-2, a Russian-built version of Iran’s Shahed-136 one-way attack drone that Russian forces fire at Ukrainian cities on a near-nightly basis. The facility has grown substantially over the past year. Satellite imagery cited by Radio Liberty showed the zone’s footprint expanded by 340 hectares between May 2025 and May 2026, with new hangars, dormitories for foreign workers, and a roughly 450-hectare construction area added south of the M-12 highway. Ukrainian analysts reported on Sept. 14 that five additional production halls had gone up in the southern part of the site, based on satellite images similarly sourced from Dnipro Osint.

Russia has also added physical protection around the plant. Satellite images from July and August analyzed by Spencer Faragasso of the Institute for Science and International Security showed a two-ring system of lattice towers under construction around Alabuga’s production buildings, an arrangement meant to complicate future drone or missile strikes on the site.

Dnipro Osint said the combined effect of these changes, underground construction, dispersed production buildings and added physical defenses, is making Russia’s drone manufacturing base progressively harder and more expensive to target. The site relies heavily on foreign labor recruited through the Alabuga Polytechnic College and other channels; the United Kingdom sanctioned 35 entities and individuals in May 2026 over recruitment tied to the facility, and the site remains under separate U.S. and European Union sanctions.