Vilask: missile silos under the Valga woods

Hidden in the forest at Tinu village near Valga lay a Soviet base unlike any other in Estonia: the only site where the Strategic Missile Forces kept R-12U medium-range missiles in underground vertical silos instead of hangars. It belonged to the 846th Guards Missile Regiment. Each launch shaft went down about 35 metres, as deep as a six-storey building is tall, and the shafts were linked to a central command post and service rooms; specialists from the Leningrad metro construction team helped to build them. The division was taken off combat duty in 1981, and the missile troops left in the early 1980s. The shafts, which had become dangerous, were filled in 2019, but the outline of the military landscape can still be traced in the woods.