Russia Builds Secret Underground Workshops for Shahed Drone Production. Here’s What Satellite Images Reveal

Russia is building underground production halls for Geran, a Shahed-derived attack drone, at its Alabuga complex in Tatarstan, according to an assessment published on September 19.

The Dnipro Osint project, drawing on satellite imagery, estimated that roughly 42,000 square meters of subterranean space had already been constructed for the planned production lines. The project treated both the scale of the excavation and its intended use as its own reading of the imagery.

Dnipro Osint concluded that striking the fortified site directly had become counterproductive, describing such attacks as "absolutely impractical from an economic point of view."

Instead, the project identified the drones' production chain as the realistic target set, pointing to:

• powder plants that manufacture the warheads;

• chemical enterprises supplying key components;

• the VNIIR "Progress" plant, whose antennas allow the drones to largely evade Ukrainian electronic warfare.

According to Dnipro Osint, the move underground followed Ukraine's earliest strikes on Alabuga and is advancing quickly. The project noted that the wider Geran ecosystem is becoming steadily harder and more expensive to hit as production shifts underground and supporting infrastructure is dispersed and reinforced.

Satellite imagery from late August recorded at least 10 new workshops and dozens of storage facilities at the site, along with lattice-tower structures erected around the main production areas. The US-based Institute for Science and International Security assessed that those structures could shield the complex from drone and cruise-missile attacks.

The project noted that Moscow was copying Iran, which relocated much of its production and storage underground in response to US and Israeli air superiority.

The Geran is Russia's domestically assembled version of Iran's Shahed-136, a delta-wing loitering munition launched in mass waves against Ukrainian cities.

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Alabuga hosts the country's largest drone-production operation. Concealing and hardening that operation complicates Ukraine's long-range campaign against the systems used in strikes on its cities.

Ukraine first struck Alabuga in April 2024, when a drone hit a dormitory at the site's "Alabuga Polytech" college and injured 13 people. Students there, including minors, have been drawn into drone assembly.

The push underground comes after fresh scrutiny of the equipment used in the Alabuga lines. On September 17, 20 pieces of foreign-made industrial equipment were discovered at the complex—lathes, milling and drilling machines, machining centers, industrial robots, and automated assembly systems supplied by firms in China, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, and Iran.