Satellite imagery shows at least two dozen mobile S-300 and S-400 systems have been pulled back from two air-defence positions that protected Severodvinsk since 2024. What once looked like a layered shield around Russia’s nuclear-submarine shipbuilding hub now appears thinned out, with the Yagry Island battery and the Mironov Hill position both largely stripped of the launchers that made them work.
That matters because Severodvinsk is not an ordinary military town. Sevmash is Russia’s only shipyard able to build nuclear-powered submarines, and Zvezdochka is the country’s biggest facility for repair, modernisation and refit of nuclear submarines. The loss of so many long-range air-defence systems around those yards comes at a moment when Russia is spreading its air-defence inventory more thinly after repeated Ukrainian drone attacks.
The clearest change is at Yagry North, the forward position that supported the larger Yagry Island Central site. Until sometime after July 2024, it housed six surface-to-air missile launchers in combat readiness, and earlier imagery identified them as S-300 systems. More recent pictures are less decisive because most of the mobile launchers were hidden under anti-drone netting, but today the site looks abandoned. There are no visible support vehicles, no equipment, and no sign of activity. The two tower-mounted Flap Lid fire-control radars that were visible before 2025 have gone, and the reserve missile canisters used to reload the launchers have also disappeared.
The other Severodvinsk position tells a similar story, even if it has been quieter for longer. The forward deployment positions at Yagry Island Central have not hosted operationally deployed S-300 or S-400 systems since the summer of 2022, when the site's mobile fire-control radar was dismantled and removed. Satellite imagery from 2025 still shows around a dozen replenishment missile canisters stored on a hardstanding outside one of the larger garages, which means the position has not been erased entirely. It also leaves open a narrower question: at Yagry North, where the site now looks deserted, some launch vehicles could still be inside the garages and hidden from view.
Severodvinsk was built around air defence for a reason. During the Cold War, an extensive network was created to protect the shipyards and the Belomorsk Naval Base, and in the post-Soviet era responsibility for the area rested with the 1528th Anti-Aircraft Missile Regiment, part of the 45th Air and Air Defence Forces Army under the Northern Fleet. That structure has not disappeared, but the satellite record shows the hardware at two key positions has been moved away. Where the withdrawn S-300 and S-400 systems were sent is still unknown, and until that is clear, the city’s most sensitive naval infrastructure is carrying less protection than it had a year ago.
