NEW satellite pictures have revealed the base housing Vladimir Putin’s prized nuclear submarines was damaged in the recent tsunami.
A pier has been snapped in half after being battered by the torrent of water following the monster 8.8 magnitude earthquake on Tuesday.
Rybachiy submarine base in Russia’s far east houses Vlad’s prized nuclear-armed Borei-class subs.
Images taken by Umbra Space reveal that a pier which has been used to host both ships and submarines is now sitting at an angle.
That would suggest it has come loose from the wharf it may have been tied to or entirely broken off.
If a submarine was sitting next to the pier at the time it could have sustained serious damage.
But the pictures are not clear enough with the Kamchatka peninsula covered by cloud on Wednesday and Thursday.
The photos also don’t clarify whether submarines visible in them were damaged.
Putin’s prized boats may have smashed up against their piers and wharves as the tsunami came through – damage not visible from a satellite.
In addition to Avacha Bay, there is a naval base in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, along with separate facilities for missile loading and a shipyard, although it remains unclear if these facilities have suffered any damage.
The earthquake hit off the coast of Kamchatka just before 1am BST on Tuesday and is the sixth biggest on record.
The base was so close to the epicentre that the tsunami is thought to have hit it within 15 minutes.
It hit just 75miles southeast of Russia’s key naval base in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky that houses its Pacific Fleet.
Locals in the village of Severo-Kurilsk in Kamchatka caught video of the resulting tsunami flooding a fish processing factory on the coast.
Despite being further away than the base, Severo-Kurilsk was swamped with waves up to five metres high.
The local port was inundated with buildings even being moved by the force of the water.
The Russian Pacific Fleet has some 600 warships and is thought to have five of the Borei class submarines.
It also has a couple dozen Soviet-era subs, including the Oscar, Delta, and Kilo classes.
The bulk of the fleet is homeported in Vladivostok, 1,400miles to the southwest.
Putin will be particularly nervous about its condition given how much of his Black Sea fleet he has lost to Ukraine’s bombs.
Umbra Space is able to take the photos as it uses Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites which are able to penetrate cloud cover.
The Kremlin announced that no one in Russia had died from the monster earthquake.
Meanwhile, in neighboring Japan, approximately 2 million people were instructed to evacuate from coastal areas due to concerns that the tsunami might result in another Fukushima nuclear disaster.
Evacuations were also ordered in Hawaii with waves hitting the islands 1.5m high.
