By Murad Rakhimov | 2025-01-17

TASHKENT -- Russia is ordering the mass production of mobile bomb shelters as part of the Kremlin's continuing efforts to whip up domestic fear and hysteria over its threats to launch a nuclear war amid the Russian military's mounting losses in Ukraine.

Russia in the past year also updated its military doctrine, deployed nuclear weapons in Belarus and enacted a new national regulation mandating the conversion of apartment buildings' basements into bomb shelters.

In November, RIA Novosti reported that an enterprise in Nizhny Novgorod province had begun mass production of modular mobile shelters procured by the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MChS).

The structure, known as a "KUB-M," is designed to protect civilians from the shock wave and optical radiation of a nuclear explosion, radioactive contamination and penetrating radiation, according to the report.

If there is danger of a retaliatory strike, 54 residents can take refuge in the shelter for up to two days, it added.

A year ago, a promotional video appeared online showing explosions, destruction, the shelter itself and MChS cadets evacuating into containers.

The portable shelter is a standard metal shipping container and has a simple interior with two tiers of benches along the walls, similar to a sleeper railway car.

Its "creature comforts" include two toilets with a 400-liter tank, a 440-liter drinking-water reservoir, a diesel generator and an air purification system.

The shelter's occupancy can be increased by adding new modules. Modules can also be connected to utility systems.

The manufacturer has not announced product prices, but similar shelters are already available online for 38 million RUB (about €358,000).

War hysteria, graft

Officials might be exploiting simultaneously war hysteria and the chance to make some money from it, said a Russian anthropologist and historian who wished to remain anonymous.

The feverish rhetoric is propaganda for now, but it could be transformed into real policy, he said.

"Some provincial officials will make a fortune from all of this," he told Kontur, referring to the various bureaucratic approvals needed to build or modernize bomb shelters.

Dmitry Dubrovsky, a lecturer in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Charles University in Prague, agreed.

Mega-construction comes with mega-corruption in Russia, he said.

"It is obvious to me that [the new set of shelters] will not be in Moscow or St. Petersburg but in other places. Otherwise, the construction in large cities would make them look like Albania, where numerous bunkers from the time of dictator Enver Hoxha have been preserved," he told Global Watch.

The current frenzy over renovating or building bomb shelters is "performative," he added.

Still, Moscow home buyers in 2022 learned from real estate advertisements about the presence of a bunker in their residential building or about nearby shelters, according to a Kommersant article entitled "Real Estate in Troubled Times."

Reactivating old bunkers

Russia still has a large number of traditional underground bomb shelters, although most of them are from the Soviet era. Since 95% of them were completed before 1993, many have seriously deteriorated or have fallen into disuse.

Some were rented by entrepreneurs, who converted them into warehouses and even opened nightclubs. Others were privatized, perhaps illegally, as the Russian authorities now say.

The Russian Accounts Chamber kept records and published data until 2016, when it found 16,448 "civil defense facilities and protective structures" throughout Russia. That number included bomb shelters.

Authorities remembered them five months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. In July 2022, the Russian Finance Ministry announced an imminent inventory of protective structures.

The purpose of the inventory was to understand whether old bomb shelters could be returned to service and to identify who owned or was responsible for them.

Two months later, the Finance Ministry even proposed compelling ordinary Russians to renovate the shelters at their own expense.