The Ladoga was the Soviet Union’s plush nuclear-war command vehicle. A drone just blew one up in Eastern Ukraine.

Before reading the article I had this sinking feeling that russian top commanders finally decided to use tactical nukes, but it looks like results of just regular absence of armored vehicles..

In the late 1970s, Soviet authorities asked the Kirovsky Design Bureau in Saint Petersburg to develop a nuclear reconnaissance and command vehicle.
And not just any nuclear reconnaissance and command vehicle, but the best protected, most comfortable nuke vehicle imaginable. A sealed, self-contained and thickly-armored turret-less tank with remote cameras and its own oxygen supply.
The result was the Ladoga. Kirovsky produced just a handful of the tracked vehicles—perhaps four or five. One spent some time in the fallout zone around the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl following the plant’s deadly 1986 meltdown. Aside from another that landed in a museum, the Ladogas then ... disappeared.
Until this week, when a Ukrainian drone spotted, and struck, what apparently was a Ladoga rolling toward Ukrainian lines near the Kreminna Forest in eastern Ukraine.
It’s no secret that the Kremlin is struggling to generate enough combat vehicles—either through new production or by fetching older vehicles from long-term storage—to make good staggering losses (15,000 vehicles and counting) along the 600-mile front line of Russia’s 25-month wider war on Ukraine.

Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/bveB3