A stunning new report by a Washington D.C. global security think tank reveals that whenever Russian President Vladimir Putin travels, Russia uses highly sophisticated technology to “spoof” Global Positioning Systems, preventing Putin from assassination via a drone attack, according to a new report by the journal Foreign Policy. The technology would cause ships and aircraft in the area where Putin is located to “think” that they are miles away from where they actually are.

But the report by the nonprofit “data-driven analysis and evidence-based” group C4ADS also found that “the use of that spoofing technology can also be tracked,” which means that Putin’s movements and locations where he has traveled can be discovered and recorded.

Between February of 2016 and November of 2018, Russia carried out 9,883 spoofing operations according to The Moscow Times. The operations took place not only in Russia but also in the annexed territory of Crimea and in Syria. How many of those spoofing operations were directly related to Putin’s personal security is unclear. The report also said that 9,883 was a “minimum” figure, and there were likely many more Russian spoofing incidents.

But one location where C4ADS found that Putin spent time was a massive, mansion on the Black Sea — a mansion that cost nearly $1 billion to build and that is believed to measure about 8 million-square-feet, according to The Telegraph newspaper.

The palatial mansion has been captured by satellite imagery publicly available via Google Maps. But Putin has consistently denied that he has any link to the mansion, according to the BBC.

BBC News - Putin's palace? A mystery Black Sea mansion fit for a tsar https://t.co/a19nvKRavU — Paul Alberts (@Paul_Alberts) April 6, 2019

If the report of a $1 billion price tag is accurate, the alleged Putin “palace” would be the second-most valuable residence in the world, behind only Buckingham Palace, home to the Queen of England, according to Investopedia.

But Russia’s use of GPS spoofing technology has much broader military and security implications than simply protecting Putin from death by drone strike. Russia’s development of sophisticated, high-tech defense systems “is part of the answer to U.S. dominance in precision weapons and airspace assault,” Michael Kofman, an expert on Russia’s military, told Foreign Policy.

According to the book The Taking of MH370, written by science journalist Jeff Wise and published last month, the still-unsolved disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 may have been the result of Russian location spoofing.

As The Inquisitr has reported, investigators now believe that the plane, which simply vanished on March 8, 2014, carrying 239 passengers and crew, was somehow taken or diverted by a “third party.”

But according to Wise, that “third party” would have needed to “spoof” the plane’s location data, creating the illusion that Flight MH370 flew south into the Indian Ocean, rather than north toward Russian-controlled territory.

“They don’t come right out and say it, but this ‘third party’ could really only be Russia,” Wise wrote on his Twitter account.