VLADIMIR Putin is preparing for war with the West, security experts fear.

The Russian president has invested heavily in decking out top-secret facilities around Moscow in the event of war.

4 Western security chiefs fear Russian president Vladimir Putin is putting in place preparations for war with Nato Credit: AP:Associated Press

4 Satellite images have revealed a giant nuclear bunker facility in Russia's remote Ural mountains region Credit: Goggle

He has even ordered the building of a 400-square mile facility in the remote wastes of the Ural mountains from where any future conflict could be directed.

Satellite images reveal the location of the huge centre near Mount Yamantau.

And the nuclear power is in the process of building the world's most powerful nuke - the Satan-2.

The deadly warhead is believed to be big enough to destroy an area the size of France.

The ramping up in military facilities comes at a time when tensions between the West and its Cold War foe are at their lowest ebb for a generation.

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Russia's annexation of the Crimea and subsequent support for pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine have dissolved cordial relations.

Nato military drills on Russia's Baltic frontiers meanwhile have fostered resentment in Moscow.

Russia's intervention in the Syrian civil war on the side of embattled dictator Bashar al-Assad goes against the Western policy of ousting the murderous president.

While its nuclear-capable Tu-95 bombers are also regularly intercepted near British aerospace by the RAF in a brazen show of sabre-rattling.

4 Russia currently has the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons - and security chiefs fear Putin is prepared to use them

4 An Il-80 command aircraft (left)would allow Russian defence chiefs to command the nation from 40,000ft in the the air Credit: Getty Images

Russia already holds the world's biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons - around 7,300 warheads.

Some of those have been placed at the very extreme of its eastern coast - just 5o miles from US territory in Alaska.

The Doomsday Clock - a means of measuring the likelihood of war - puts the current time at 23.57, with all-out war being 00:00.

It represents the closest the clock has come to midnight since 1984 and before that the early-1950s.

Should war break out, the Russians plan to conduct the first phases of a conflict from the high-tech Ilyushin Il-80 jet, experts believe.

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