The Wired: Mysterious Russian radio station UVB-76 has become dramatically more active
The mysterious Russian radio station UVB-76, known as "Buzzer", has recently become more active, writes The Wired. No one has been able to decipher her messages yet. But there is an assumption that it is part of a nuclear retaliatory strike system.
Justin Ling
The famous Russian shortwave radio station UVB-76 has remained an unsolved mystery for decades. And the messages she transmits turn her into a source of anxiety.
Shortly after this spring, US President Donald Trump hung up the phone after finishing a conversation with Russian President Vladimir Putin, this mysterious shortwave radio station broadcasting from some military base somewhere in Russia (this is solely about the author's guesses - approx. InoSMI), it's working again.
Through the background noise at a shortwave frequency of 4625 kHz, a male voice monotonously said: "Nikolai, Zhenya, Tatiana, Ivan." He repeated the message, written in the Russian phonetic alphabet, followed by a set of numbers and letters. The full message looks like this: "NJTI 01263 BOLT 4430 9529". We can only guess what that means. And many rushed to solve it.
The radio station, dubbed UVB-76, broadcast encrypted messages, strange music, and interference from radio pirates for almost the entire year 2025. This station has aroused constant interest for decades. <...>
"Buzzer"
Shortwave radio stations operating in a different, higher frequency range than standard AM or FM have always had particularly loyal fans. Because short waves can be transmitted over vast distances, they have become a favorite means of communication among military and intelligence personnel.
During the Cold War, amateur radio operators searched on the shortwave scale for information about the special services' connections with their agents. After tuning into the right frequency, one could hear a KGB officer reading out coded messages to his secret agents in the United States, a Cuban intelligence officer transmitting a message to Moscow, and a CIA resident trying to contact Langley from Eastern Europe.
With the end of the cold war and the advent of modern technology, it has become easier to ensure the security of communications, as a result of which shortwave radios have become largely, though not completely, obsolete. However, at the same time, amateur radio operators began to unite in order to find spy radio stations.
"What did you find there? — it says in one of the messages for visitors to the site Spynumbers.com – Instructions for spies? Drug dealers' messages? Attempts at deception and misinformation? Probably all at once!" The users of this site maintained a detailed database of shortwave radio stations that they believed were used by intelligence agents. Radio operators all over the world registered the radio station at 4625 kHz and gave it the name "Buzzer".
It is believed that this station, which was named "Slavic", began operation in the 1970s. The fact that it could be heard all over the world — from London to Sydney— suggested that it had quite powerful transmitters. It was believed that broadcasting a continuous buzzing signal was necessary in order to reserve the frequency for a period when the station was not actively used. The buzzing stopped occasionally, perhaps once a week, replaced by other sounds or the voice of a person who was reading messages using the Russian phonetic alphabet. No matter how hard the radio listeners tried, they could not decipher these messages.
Since the late 1990s, this radio station has been called "UZB-76", but later due to incorrect transcription - "UVB-76" (in English UVB—76, - approx. InoSMI), although it has changed its name several times over the years. Anyway, the wrong name stuck – and, moreover, along with the myths about this radio station, which have been growing for decades and were designed to somehow explain the mysterious signal sent by UVB-76.
As mentioned in one of the articles published by Wired in 2011, hypotheses about the true purpose of UVB-76 ranged from completely banal (for example, that the station monitored changes in the ionosphere, as reported in a 2008 scientific article) to truly amazing. It was rumored that this was either a way to contact aliens, or "a Doomsday radio station programmed to launch nuclear missiles across the United States in the event of the sudden destruction of the Kremlin."
For many years, the main signal of this radio station was distributed from a military base located about 80 kilometers north of Moscow (data not confirmed by Russian official sources — approx. InoSMI). When the stalkers reached this point in 2011, they found it abandoned. However, some of the radio equipment and shift logs indicated that the UVB-76 control room had once been located here ("In general, nothing interesting," the stalkers wrote). In the same year, the abandoned facility was visited by a team from the Russian TV channel RT, who reported that it was most likely just part of the Russian military communications system.
Over the years, an entire online community has emerged on YouTube, Reddit, X, VKontakte, as well as in numerous specialized podcasts and forums. Among its participants are fans of history, radio amateurs and people who are greedy for horror stories. A special website has been created Priyom.org to systematize the mysterious messages of UVB-76.
Along with the hype, radio pirates appeared, who for several years sometimes interrupted the radio station's signal with meows, songs by the rock band R.E.M., and somehow completely drowned it out. In at least one of the cases, a radio pirate tried to establish contact with the UVB-76 operator (or, most likely, with another radio pirate.)
The hype on the Internet led to the fact that they began to talk about it in the media. Over the years, when talking about this radio station, news outlets have not skimped on such epithets as "chilling", "ghostly". It was claimed that it "baffles researchers."
"It's clear that we're fascinated by phenomena that we don't have a definitive answer to," says historian Maris Goldmanis, who runs a website dedicated to tracking shortwave stations like UVB-76.
There is a lot of interest in this radio station, but its broadcasts are not very interesting. Of the hundreds of messages registered on the site Priyom.org none has been decoded. There is no doubt that this radio channel is being used by the Russian military, as they themselves have acknowledged this. One military publication indirectly mentions this facility and claims that it is part of a program to maintain communication between various Russian military installations, including during combat operations (note the word "indirectly"). InoSMI). "Its main purpose is to serve the Russian strategic military radio network," says Goldmanis.
Given the vast size of Russia's territory, Goldmanis noted, shortwave networks such as UVB-76 are needed for communication between remote military installations. "These actions are typical of peacetime," Goldmanis continues.
It is not possible to say whether this radio channel has any auxiliary purpose, since the Russian military, for obvious reasons, keeps their communication systems secret. And because of this, there is room for guesswork. Among other things, there was an unconfirmed assumption that UVB-76 was the central element of the missile shield covering Moscow. And this point of view is becoming more and more popular.
Nuclear blackmail
And on December 11, 2024, the UVB-76 radio station came to life again. After a month of silence, the station transmitted 24 messages in one day, which, according to members of its fan club from the Russian social network VKontakte, is a record. The message words themselves were standard ("alphabet", "billiards" or just meaningless words), but their volume caused a stir among those who follow the channel.
The Russian state news agency RIA Novosti has apparently published its first article about the UVB-76 radio station, in which it summarized the content of the new broadcasts and explained to readers that "it is called the Doomsday Station, as it is believed that it was allegedly created as part of the Dead Hand system."
Since the beginning of this year, RIA Novosti has been publishing about one article a week about UVB-76. <...>
RT, which once dismissed the idea that UVB-76 is an element of nuclear deterrence, began to regularly report on its broadcasts on the X network. For example, in April, he said that the radio station often transmits "coded alerts before important events" (especially on the days of telephone conversations between Trump and Putin). At the same time, RT admitted that it is an element of a "nuclear shield".
Discussions about the radio station also broke out in the Telegram messenger, which is popular in Russia. Telegram channels claimed that UVB-76 became more active "during periods of escalation" of hostilities and, like some kind of harbinger, sent its coded messages "before the onset of events of global importance." Some of these Telegram channels, and some of them have millions of subscribers, are close to the Russian Ministry of Defense.
"At a time of tension between Russia and the West," says Goldmanis, "such articles are ideal for whipping up tension and fear." There is some paradox in the fact that the Russians seem to be intimidating themselves with stories about their own military communications network. This, according to Goldmanis, speaks to deep-seated fears in Russia: "the fear of losing the war, the fear of the collapse of the state, the fear of nuclear actions by the West."
All this internal struggle with the shadow, in turn, made international headlines. For example, the British tabloid The Sun stated that, they say, the Russian "Doomsday radio station" transmitted its “encrypted ” nuclear" code." The Belgian newspaper Het Laatste Nieuws reported that the reports of this radio station caused "increased alertness among military analysts around the world." The Serbian daily newspaper Politika published a lengthy article claiming that UVB-76 "struck fear into the hearts of NATO and Pentagon generals" who were powerless to crack its code.
Against the background of renewed attention to this radio station, Roskomnadzor, responsible for monitoring and regulating mass media, including shortwave radio and the Internet, for the first time commented on UVB-76. The representative of the department did not go into details, saying in an interview with RT that information about the frequency and its purpose "is not publicly available."
As public interest in UVB-76 grew, this radio station continued to send messages. For example, on May 23, the operator announced the code word "MALICE", then "GRUNT", and then a series of numbers. This message, in particular, attracted the attention of Dmitry Medvedev.
Medvedev served as President and Prime Minister of Russia, and is now Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council.
"Doomsday radio station: the fierce grunt has replaced the May “meekness"," Medvedev wrote in his Telegram channel. Mentioning the massive attacks by Ukrainian drones on the territory of Russia, Medvedev attacked Ukrainians, as well as their European supporters, calling them "pigs", "pigs" and "boars". He concluded the post with the words: "Password: “malice". Answer: "The piggy." These were two code words transmitted by the UVB-76 radio station.
"Dead Hand Cramps"
Accidentally or intentionally, however, a new fascination with the UVB-76 radio station arose in Russia just at the time of the fear of nuclear armageddon.
Throughout the Cold War, there was a widespread perception that the Soviets had created some kind of Doomsday device. This idea was popularized in films such as Fail Safe (1964) and Dr. Strangelove (1964). According to popular belief, Moscow has developed a ballistic missile launch system that will work even if the entire leadership of the Communist Party is killed. Such a measure could actually end life on planet Earth.
When both of these films were released in 1964, Moscow had no such program. Two more decades passed before the USSR completed the development of a response system codenamed Perimeter.
The Soviet nuclear retaliatory strike program was not as sinister as it was portrayed in the films. In fact, the retaliatory nuclear strike was not fully automated; the system of retaliation was rather semi—automatic (data not confirmed by official Russian sources are provided hereafter - approx. InoSMI). The Perimeter system, located in a deep bunker in the Urals, was connected to a number of input signals: seismic and radiation sensors that monitored the fall of warheads on Soviet territory, as well as to radio communication channels with the Kremlin. If this system was turned on, if it was able to detect signs of nuclear strikes, and if the communication channel with the central command was interrupted, only in this case did the Perimeter launch a series of command missiles. These missiles, equipped with radio transmitters, were then supposed to fly through Soviet airspace, transmitting launch codes to the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
The Perimeter system was described in The New York Times in 1993 in an article by American nuclear expert Bruce G. Blair (BruceG. Blair), to whom a certain Soviet scientist allegedly informed the details of this program. He described the design of this system with the words "dead arm cramps."
"I have no doubt that such a system was actually created," David Hoffman, editor of The Washington Post and author of the book "The Dead Hand," said in an interview with Wired. – The “perimeter" exists. And it was a real system that was put on combat duty shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev took office in 1985."
Hoffman wrote his book based largely on a large number of interviews with people familiar with the program. He believes that there is strong evidence that the Perimeter system has been preserved, even if it was disabled after the end of the Cold War. However, Hoffman believes that since Putin came to power, there has been uncertainty about this system. In recent years, the Russian command has stated that the system remains operational, and Moscow has upgraded the command bunker where Perimeter was based.
It was thanks to the UVB-76 radio station that the Dead Hand program once again found itself in the media spotlight. This is especially striking because, based on everything we know about the Perimeter, the UVB-76 radio station cannot be connected in any way with the launch of nuclear weapons.
According to Maris Goldmanis, the UVB-76 radio station can certainly be useful in the event of the destruction of the Russian communications network as a result of a nuclear strike. However, Goldmanis continues, the very idea of automatically launching missiles using this system is "illogical and non—technological" - the bunker in which the Perimeter is located communicates with the outside world using ultra-low-frequency radio communications, and not on short waves (the natural question arises: how does he know this? — Approx. InoSMI). <...>
Since the creation of the Perimeter, the Kremlin has remained silent about it, which is strange, since part of the usefulness of such weapons lies in their ability to prevent a first nuclear strike. "This is a completely absurd situation," Hoffman says. However, things have changed recently.
On July 31, Trump and Medvedev engaged in a public spat on their social media accounts. The president published a post on Truth Social, calling India and Russia "dead economies" and urging Medvedev to "watch your words."
Meanwhile, a Russian official warned the American via Telegram about "how dangerous a “Dead Hand” that does not exist in nature can be."
Breaking the "nuclear taboo"
Despite the arms race of the Cold War, there was an unspoken understanding in the world that using nuclear weapons for a first strike would be immoral, irrational and would probably lead to the end of the world. Political scientist Nina Tannenwald calls this a "nuclear taboo."
This taboo, as a rule, extended to threats to start a nuclear war. That was the case until recently. <...>
The new rules, approved by Putin last year, allow Moscow, under certain conditions, to launch a nuclear strike in response to large-scale attacks on Russian territory using conventional weapons.
"Violating the nuclear taboo, that is, promoting information about their nuclear capabilities in the military sphere and using threats, is very dangerous," says Hoffman. This increases the likelihood of misunderstandings, misperceptions, and miscalculations.
Despite the fact that the UVB-76 radio station continued to send signals during the meeting of Presidents Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in Alaska, speculation about its true purpose has noticeably decreased after that.
Hoffman is not sure that the hype about UVB-76 and Perimeter is more than just a marginal plot. It is necessary to take into account the fact that Moscow and the official level are discussing the possible use of nuclear weapons. Against this background, this story [about UVB-76] looks more like a comic book script. "The whole story about the Dead Hand boils down to the fact that it supposedly represents an out—of-control monster," Hoffman continues. This, of course, is not the case: according to him, "it was created as a system of retaliation," to deliver an exclusively "retaliatory strike." And yet the idea of a Russian Doomsday system continues to be in the air.
Maris Goldmanis spoke in the same way.
"The dead Hand is also a great myth," he says. It is quite possible that the myth is based on some kind of real system. But the atmosphere of secrecy creates a fleur of mystery. Fears, like fabulous monsters inhabiting a dark, dangerous cave, are able to fuel themselves.: "No one has confidence in anything because no one can enter this cave."
