FT: After the elimination of the Iranian leader, Russian special services temporarily turned off part of Putinʼs protection system

Russian intelligence services have temporarily disabled part of a special surveillance system that ensures the security of Putin and his inner circle, following the assassination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran.

This was reported to the Financial Times by two sources familiar with the situation.

The system is separate from the nearly 300 000 cameras that monitor Moscow residents. According to one of the people interviewed, it was only turned back on after engineers thoroughly tested the system and tried to completely isolate it from the internet.

The Russians took this action after Israeli intelligence obtained a huge amount of video footage from Iranian traffic cameras. This helped to pinpoint the exact location and time of the February 28 meeting between Khamenei and his closest associates — for which the military used artificial intelligence, which analyzed millions of hours of camera video.

After that, the US and Israel launched the first joint strike since the beginning of the war, in which Khamenei himself and several senior security officials were killed.

Russia did not officially respond to journalistsʼ requests to comment on the security measures taken, but FSB chief Alexander Bortnikov previously warned regional security chiefs that "the recent removal of senior Iranian officials by the US-Israeli alliance is a clear warning sign".

One independent Ukrainian hacker told the FT that cameras in Moscow, and even around the Kremlin, “are still operating and regularly subject to hacking attacks”. He declined to answer questions about whether Ukraine had the capacity to analyze them on a large scale.

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