Shortly after US president Donald Trump hung up a call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin this spring, an obscure shortwave radio channel, broadcasting from a military base somewhere in Russia, sprang to life.
Through a fog of static, at 4625 kHz on the shortwave dial, a man’s voice spoke in monotone: “Nikolai, Zhenya, Tatiana, Ivan.” He repeats the message—spelled out in the Russian phonetic alphabet—followed by a series of numbers and letters. The whole message reads: “NZhTI 01263 BOLTANKA 4430 9529.” What it means is anyone’s guess, but lots of people were guessing.
This radio station, dubbed UVB-76, has spent much of 2025 broadcasting cryptic messages, strange music, and pirate interruptions. The channel has elicited fascination for decades. This time, however, something is different. Now, Moscow’s network of propagandists and warmongers are suddenly fascinated by this obscure channel.
UVB-76’s real purpose is almost certainly innocuous and mundane. But in recent weeks, Moscow has capitalized on the eerie fixation with the channel to stoke fears of nuclear armageddon.
The Buzzer
Shortwave radio, which operates on a different frequency and a wider spectrum than AM or FM radio broadcasts, has always had a particularly dedicated fandom. Because shortwave broadcasts can traverse huge distances, it became a favorite medium for soldiers and spies.
Throughout the Cold War, ham radio hobbyists searched the shortwave dial in search of agencies communicating with their agents. Tune in to the right frequency, and you could hear a KGB officer reading out coded messages for their undercover operatives in America, a Cuban intelligence officer relaying a message to Moscow, or a CIA asset in eastern Europe trying to get in touch with Langley.
The end of the Cold War and the advent of modern technology made secure communication easier—making these shortwave radio stations largely, though not entirely, obsolete. At the same time, however, amateur radio fans began congregating online, and they scoured for spy stations on the radio dial.
“What have you stumbled on to?” reads a message posted to curious visitors to Spynumbers.com. “Instructions to spies? Messages exchanged between drug dealers? Deliberate attempts at deception and mis-information? Chances are, all of the above!” The website’s users kept a meticulous database of the shortwave stations that, they believed, were used by spooks. Operators around the world logged the station at 4625 Khz as “The Buzzer.”
The station, which was categorized only as “Slavic,” is thought to have come online in the 1970s. The fact that it could be heard straight across the globe—from London to Sydney—suggested that it had some pretty powerful transmitters behind it. A perpetual tone, an incessant buzzing, was thought to be a way for the operator to reserve the frequency, even when it wasn’t actively being used. The buzzing would infrequently stop, perhaps once a week, replaced with other tones or a man reading a message using the Russian phonetic alphabet. Try as they might, listeners never decoded those messages.
Starting in the late 1990s, the station used the call sign УЗБ-76—later mistranslated as UVB-76—although it would change that handle repeatedly over the years. Nevertheless, the incorrect title stuck. As did the station’s mythos, which has grown over the decades to try to explain UVB-76’s mysterious signal.