Russia's Cozy Nuke-Proof Command Vehicle Is Back in Action
Russian industry only produced four or five Ladoga nuclear reconnaissance vehicles; two wound up in Ukraine
In the late 1970s, Soviet officials tapped the Kirovsky Design Bureau in Saint Petersburg to develop a reconnaissance and command vehicle for nuclear warfare: a sealed, self-contained and thickly-armored turret-less tank with remote cameras and its own oxygen supply.
The Ladoga recon and command vehicle wasn’t just nuke-proof. It was also weirdly cozy.
Kirovsky produced just a handful of the tracked vehicles—maybe four or five. One spent some time in the irradiated zone around the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl, in northern Ukraine, following the plant’s catastrophic meltdown in 1986. Aside from another that ended up in a museum, the Ladogas then simply disappeared.
Until March 2024, that is—when a Ukrainian drone spotted, and struck, what appeared to be a Ladoga rolling toward Ukrainian lines near the Kreminna Forest in eastern Ukraine. Seventeen months later, another—or the same—Ladoga appeared at a repair yard somewhere in the Russian occupation zone.
It’s possible half the Ladogas Kirovsky produced—and the majority that aren’t on display or badly irradiated—have made their way to Ukraine.