The Russian tech corporation Yandex recently edited a satellite image of a Russian missile position outside the town of Kronstadt, near St. Petersburg, replacing the entire site with an image of forest, according to a report by Finnish public broadcaster Yle. The image shows visible editing seams and repeated patches of vegetation. The military site remains visible on satellite maps from Western services.
Previously, Yandex typically hid military and other sensitive sites by blurring specific areas. In the Kronstadt case, editors appear to have tried to hide the position’s existence altogether by copying natural landscape over it. The company did not respond to Yle’s questions about the origin of the edited image.
The area previously held Bastion anti-ship missile systems, as well as radar systems and signals intelligence equipment. Marko Eklund, a former Finnish military intelligence officer, identified launchers and radars in a Google Earth image from July 2022. Equipment was last clearly recorded at the position in April 2026.
Eklund said the retouching is useless from a military standpoint because Ukraine and Western intelligence agencies use their own satellite imagery. In his view, the editing likely reflects an administrative ban on publishing images of certain sites. Western mapping services also hide some military facilities, but fixed positions remain visible in images from other satellite operators.
In 2024, a Russian court ordered Yandex to hide the Ryazan oil refinery in satellite images because of Ukrainian drone attacks. In a joint investigation, Northern European media, including Swedish national broadcaster SVT, counted 119 blurred sites in western Russia, including military bases and nuclear power plants. The hidden locations also included Vladimir Putin’s residence at Valdai.
Kronstadt remains one of the key bases of Russia’s Baltic Fleet. In June, Ukrainian drones struck the missile corvette Boikiy, which was in dry dock there, causing a fire on the vessel after two hits. Later satellite image analysis showed serious damage to the ship’s radar systems and electronic warfare equipment.
