Russia Shuts Putin's Secret Security System After Khamenei Assassination

Russian security agencies have implemented unprecedented precautionary measures by shutting down large sections of a confidential surveillance system designed to protect President Vladimir Putin and his closest aides, sources told the Financial Times. This move followed the assassination of Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran.

According to one source, this sensitive security system operates independently from Moscow's general surveillance network, which includes approximately 300,000 cameras monitoring the city's residents. The secret system was deactivated and only reactivated after engineers conducted a thorough and intensive inspection aimed at completely isolating it from the global internet.

Russian authorities took these emergency steps after Israeli intelligence successfully hacked into Iranian traffic cameras, acquiring extensive video footage. This enabled them to pinpoint the exact location and timing of a high-level meeting held on February 28 between Khamenei and his closest aides. The meeting resulted in the deaths of several senior Iranian security officials and marked the initial spark for the ongoing joint conflict involving the United States and Israel against the Islamic Republic.

The assassination highlighted a technological leap in espionage, relying on artificial intelligence techniques to analyze millions of hours of video collected from thousands of cameras to precisely track and monitor targets.

Despite Russia's stringent measures, an independent Ukrainian hacker told the Financial Times that Moscow's cameras, including those around the Kremlin, "remain operational and are regularly hacked." However, the hacker declined to confirm whether Ukraine currently possesses the technical capability to analyze such vast data on a large scale. It is known that the United States and the United Kingdom, which have advanced tools, have previously provided the Ukrainian military with precise targeting information and intelligence based on high-resolution drone imagery.

On the Iranian front, a knowledgeable source revealed that during the December 2025 protests, the Iranian regime installed new video cameras to monitor and control crowds.

A regional official disclosed that Israel managed to hack the live feeds from these new cameras, gaining critical intelligence on the identities and members of the Basij forces, a paramilitary group relied upon by the regime for internal security purposes.

In March, when Basij forces established checkpoints during the conflict, Israel was able to accurately identify their members despite many removing their distinctive, unofficial camouflage vests to conceal their identities.

An informed source involved in the operation explained that this digital identification was possible due to aggregated data streams from car cameras, traffic cameras, vehicle registration numbers, and movement pattern analysis at checkpoints observed by drones.