An investigation by Systema, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Russian investigative unit, concludes that Vladimir Putin has been filmed working from three near-identical offices in different parts of Russia, enabling the Kremlin to blur his whereabouts during official meetings and televised appearances.
The rooms — at Novo-Ogaryovo outside Moscow, the Bocharov Ruchey residence in Sochi, and the Valdai compound in Novgorod region — share the same beige palette and almost matching furnishings. Systema says the set-up has been used “hundreds of times” to present events as occurring in one place when they were recorded elsewhere.
Systema’s team reviewed around 700 videos issued by the Kremlin or broadcast on state television, then cross-checked them against travel records and other open sources. They identified minute but consistent visual cues that distinguish the rooms: the height of a door handle relative to a wall seam; the style of a television stand; the hue and grain of a wooden document tray; and a thermostat position that is unique to Valdai. In one case, footage labelled as Novo-Ogaryovo was matched to Sochi by the placement of the door handle and corroborating travel data for the TV interviewer involved.
The Sochi “twin” of the office had been suggested previously by Russian outlet Proekt in 2020. Systema now places it inside the Bocharov Ruchey complex and provides additional visual and documentary corroboration. The Kremlin has denied in the past that “identical offices” exist, but did not respond to Systema’s latest queries.
According to the investigation, the practice has intensified since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Systema finds that many meetings presented as taking place at Novo-Ogaryovo in 2025 were in fact filmed at Valdai, a secluded wooded site roughly midway between Moscow and St Petersburg. Between January and the end of September this year, all but one of 30 appearances in the now-familiar beige office were recorded at Valdai. The findings suggest a systematic preference for the location during a period of frequent Ukrainian long-range drone strikes against military and energy facilities inside Russia.
Security considerations are central to this shift, the report argues. Bocharov Ruchey sits on exposed high ground on the Black Sea coast, and overt defensive measures would attract attention in the Moscow suburbs around Novo-Ogaryovo. By contrast, Valdai is heavily secluded and has seen a marked build-up of point air defences since early 2023. Systema cites RFE/RL Russian Service reporting in August that at least a dozen positions — predominantly Pantsir-S1 systems, some mounted on towers — have been emplaced around the compound and nearby sites. Independent outlets including The Moscow Times, Novaya Gazeta Europe and The Insider have described the same deployment based on satellite and mapping imagery.
The investigative unit illustrates how the cloned-office arrangement functions in practice. Visual vanishing points — a seam in the wall panelling, a thermostat’s placement, subtle differences in furniture legs — allow analysts to separate Sochi from Novo-Ogaryovo, and both from Valdai, even when official captions state otherwise. In several cases, leaked e-mail traffic and ticketing data for state TV personnel align with the visual analysis, indicating that crews were in Sochi or Valdai when programmes aired as if filmed near Moscow.
Systema’s conclusions extend beyond the three rooms themselves. The unit notes a broader pattern of “preserves” — pre-recorded meetings released later and presented as current — that has continued into autumn 2025. This practice, documented in an earlier Systema report, raises questions about the timing and context of official announcements, including those involving ministers and regional governors.
The Sochi replica office is now seldom used, Systema reports, with Putin largely avoiding Bocharov Ruchey from February 2023 onwards. Valdai appears to have become his principal working base for remote engagements, while the Novo-Ogaryovo room is used more sparingly than the Kremlin’s public diary suggests. The analysis does not claim that the rooms are exact copies: it is precisely their small divergences that expose the mislabelling of locations.
Air-defence enhancements at Valdai provide additional context. Multiple investigations this summer and autumn mapped at least 12 Pantsir-S1 sites within reach of the residence, a density some comparisons place at only five times fewer than the wider Moscow region, which hosts a far larger population. Satellite imagery published by RFE/RL and corroborating outlets underpins those assessments.
The Kremlin’s motive, as presented by sources quoted in Systema’s report, is straightforward: to minimise risk and complicate external tracking of the president’s movements. By keeping the visual field constant across multiple secure locations, the administration reduces the number of clues in public footage — while the secluded Valdai base, heavily defended and less observable than the Moscow suburbs or the Black Sea coast, has become the default venue for on-camera work.
Systema’s latest publication adds fresh granularity to a story first aired in 2020 and intermittently documented since: identical backdrops, different places. What is new is the scale of the video corpus analysed, the fusion of visual and documentary evidence, and a clear post-2022 trend towards Valdai.
