A Russian crew takes off for the ISS against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine

Three Russian cosmonauts took off on Friday on a Soyuz rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS), amid strong tensions between Moscow and Western countries over the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The crew — composed of its commander Oleg Artemiev and Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov — took off at 15H55 GMT from a base in Kazakhstan and will fly three hours to the International Space Station (ISS), where it will be met by a team of two Russians, four Americans and one German.

Until recently, space cooperation between Russia and Western countries was one of the few areas that had not suffered much from the sanctions imposed on Moscow following the 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian Crimean peninsula.

However, tensions had begun to arise, especially after Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed nationalist Dmitry Rogozin as head of Russian space agency Roscosmos in 2018.

The latter regularly shows his support for what Russia calls “a special military operation” in Ukraine.

“Ours! For the first time in many years, it is a completely Russian crew,” he welcomed himself on Twitter hours before the launch.

Recently, he assured that Western sanctions introduced against Moscow by Ukraine could lead to the collapse of the ISS.

According to him, the operation of Russian ships supplying the ISS will be affected by sanctions, which will affect the Russian segment of the station.

As a result, this could lead to “'the scorching” or the 'landing' of the ISS weighing 500 tons,” he warned on March 12.

The thrusters of Russian ships docked at the station are used to correct the orbit of the space structure.

This procedure is performed ten times a year to keep it at the right altitude, or to avoid space debris on its way.

Americans alone do not have this ability, confirmed on Monday Joel Montalbano, director of the station's program for NASA.

“The Space Station was designed on the principle of interdependence (...) it is not a process in which one group can separate from the other,” he added.

“At present, there is no indication that our Russian partners want to do things differently. Therefore, we plan to continue operations as we do today,” he said.

- Declined medal -

Rogozin also had a virtual riffle with billionaire Elon Musk, founder of the space company SpaceX, who challenged Vladimir Putin on Monday by offering him a “man-to-man fight” with Ukraine as a gamble on Twitter.

“Elon, get out of the bathroom so we can talk a little,” Rogozin tweeted, referring to a message from the American magnate in which he said he writes at least 50% of his tweets on his “porcelain throne.”

On board the ISS, Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts avoided talking about the conflict that has already claimed thousands of lives and caused one of the biggest refugee crises in Europe since World War II.

Astronaut Mark Vande Hei became the subject of a Russian bait: Roscosmos posted a video saying that the American could stay on the ISS instead of returning to Earth aboard a Soyuz rocket on March 30.

Scott Kelly, a NASA astronaut whose record for consecutive days in space was broken by Mark Vande Hei this week, responded to the joke by rejecting a medal awarded to him by the Russian government.

Last encounter in space cooperation, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced on Thursday that it was suspending the Russian-European mission ExoMars and is looking for alternatives to launch four other missions due to the offensive in Ukraine.

Dmitri Rogozin called this fact “bitter” and assured that Russia will be able to carry out this mission alone in “a few years”.

cr/rl/has/js/es/aoc/oak