Ukraine Turns Its Long-Range Arsenal on Russia’s Space and Military Satellite Infrastructure

Kyiv, Ukraine – Russian Aerospace Forces (RAF) commander-in-chief Aleksandr Chayko narrowly escaped an explosion that killed his son-in-law.

Chayko, who turned 55 in the final days of July, was reportedly hosting a delayed birthday gathering on August 1 at an upscale Italian restaurant in central Moscow.

However, the festivities were abruptly interrupted when an unidentified woman carrying a homemade explosive device attempted to gain entry to the establishment. She was intercepted by a security guard, according to Russian officials. The device in her bag exploded, claiming at least five lives.

The Kremlin neither confirmed the death toll nor denied the incident, instead attributing the assault to the “bloody tentacles” of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration.

Kyiv has not publicly addressed the attack.

Russia’s Space Programme in the Firing Line

Chayko played a significant role in directing Russia’s military intervention in Syria and led Russian forces operating north of Kyiv during the early phase of the 2022 invasion.

Ukraine has formally accused him of committing war crimes.

In May, President Vladimir Putin elevated him to the position of commander-in-chief of the RAF, the branch responsible for overseeing the military segment of Russia’s space operations.

The RAF utilises its satellite networks and ground-based space infrastructure for intelligence gathering, navigation, and the coordination of ground forces, as well as drone and missile strikes.

The majority of these installations are situated in western Russia, placing them within the operational range of Ukraine’s newly developed long-range drones and missiles.

“Key manufacturing facilities are limited in number, and they all fall within the reach of Ukrainian missiles,” explained Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher affiliated with the University of Bremen in Germany, in an interview with Al Jazeera.

“These attacks are likely to cause—and will undoubtedly cause—significant disruptions to Russia’s entire space programme, including its civilian and international initiatives,” he added.

‘Long-Range Sanctions’

In late June, Ukrainian drone strikes targeted a major space communications hub in Dubna, a quiet town outside Moscow. The facility was responsible for managing reconnaissance satellites and processing military intelligence.

The assault inflicted damage on a 32-metre (105-foot) satellite antenna, modular hardware complexes, central control consoles, and various technical structures.

“Our long-range sanctions against Russia for this war have once again reached the Dubna space communications centre,” President Zelenskyy announced on June 30.

Russian officials acknowledged that an unspecified structure in Dubna sustained damage and confirmed the death of a six-month-old infant.

Ukrainian drones have also hit three smaller space communication centres across western Russia and in the annexed Crimean peninsula.

“These centres are extraordinarily expensive and incredibly labour-intensive to construct,” noted Anatoly Zak, a United States-based author and one of the leading authorities on the Russian space programme, in comments to Al Jazeera. “Reassigning their functions to alternative infrastructure is exceedingly difficult” because they oversee geostationary satellites that are “fixed” to a specific geographic location.

To date, there is no evidence suggesting that the satellites have deviated from their orbits or lost operational control, but “behind the scenes, there are undoubtedly serious communication issues,” Zak stated.

Ukraine Attacks ‘When There’s a Fully Fuelled Rocket on the Launchpad’

On August 23, waves of Ukrainian drones travelled more than 1,800 kilometres (1,120 miles) to reach Russia’s northwestern Arkhangelsk region.

Regional authorities claimed that approximately 40 drones were intercepted, but at least two penetrated airspace near Plesetsk, Russia’s primary military cosmodrome and a launch site for intercontinental ballistic missiles as well as rockets carrying military payloads.

No damage was reported. The following day, Roscosmos, the state-owned space corporation, announced the successful launch of a rocket carrying unspecified “military satellites.”

The timing of the Ukrainian operation—following two earlier strikes this year—was strategically calculated to target a booster rocket that had just been fuelled and positioned for liftoff.

“There have been three attempts to bombard Plesetsk, and not merely bombard it, but to strike at the precise moment when a fully fuelled rocket is sitting on the launchpad, ready to ignite,” Zak explained.

The incidents were deemed serious enough to warrant direct reports to President Putin.

“Our [Ukrainian] ‘friends’ did everything in their power to ensure this launch did not proceed,” Dmitry Bakanov, head of the Kremlin-controlled Roscosmos space agency, informed Putin in April.

According to Pavel Luzin, an analyst with the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, DC-based research institute, a minimum of a dozen drones would be required to inflict meaningful damage on Plesetsk’s launch infrastructure or rocket assembly facilities.

The military satellites deployed from Plesetsk are part of the Rassvet (Dawn) constellation, which Moscow claims is designed to compete with and ultimately replace the Starlink satellite modems operated by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

The World’s Most-Launched Spacecraft

Sputnik 1, Earth’s inaugural artificial satellite, was roughly the size of a fitness ball and contained nothing more than a radio transmitter and three silver-zinc batteries.

The “Sputnik moment” refers to the United States’ awakening, following the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch, to the realisation that the USSR had achieved a领先 position in space technology and scientific capability.

However, Sputnik 1 was launched aboard a modified R-7—the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile, originally engineered to deliver a hydrogen bomb across continents. The identical rocket technology capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the United States had been ingeniously adapted to place a satellite into orbit.

The R-7 evolved into the prototype for the Soyuz booster rockets, the most frequently launched spacecraft in history, which rendered Soviet and subsequently Russian launches routine and dependable, in stark contrast to the more volatile US space shuttle programme.

“Rain or shine, sleet or snow—none of it matters,” remarked Mark Bowman, deputy director of NASA’s human spaceflight programme, during a 2007 interview at the Baikonur spaceport, the world’s oldest operational launch facility located in southern Kazakhstan, which Russia leases.

The sole production site for Soyuz rockets is the Progress Rocket and Space Centre, situated in the Volga River city of Samara—which was struck by Ukrainian missiles on August 15. The attack triggered a fire and caused minor damage to one of the facilities.

“Based on current observations, the damage in Samara does not appear to be critical,” Luzin assessed.

If the damage were to escalate to a critical level, Russia would lose its capacity to manufacture Soyuz rockets; nevertheless, the existing inventory of rockets would sustain operations for approximately one year, he added.

During the Cold War era, Soviet authorities deliberately downplayed the military dimensions of their space programme, instead championing its “peaceful exploration of space.”

The USSR achieved numerous historic firsts: sending the first dog, the first man, and the first woman into space, and deploying the world’s inaugural space station. In 1988, its Buran space shuttle became the first automated spacecraft to complete an unmanned orbital flight and return to Earth for an autonomous landing.

Soviet unmanned probes accomplished soft landings on Venus and Mars and captured the first photographs of the moon’s far side.

Several prominent figures of the Soviet space programme were born in territories that now constitute modern-day Ukraine, and a network of vital design bureaus and manufacturing plants continued operations there following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union.

After Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and the subsequent deterioration of Russian-Ukrainian relations, Ukrainian aerospace enterprises severed their long-established partnerships with Moscow, disrupting decades-old supply chains for booster components, guidance systems, electronics, and other critical materials.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine further intensified the international isolation of its civilian space programme, as Western governments and space agencies suspended or cancelled numerous planned missions and collaborative ventures.

Following the outbreak of war in 2022, the European Space Agency terminated its partnership with Roscosmos on the ExoMars mission, removing the Russian-built Kazachok landing platform from the project aimed at detecting signs of ancient life on Mars.

That same year, Germany deactivated its X-ray telescope aboard Spektr-RG, a joint Russia-German space observatory tasked with mapping galaxy clusters and surveying the cosmos for black holes.

In pursuit of marginal territorial gains in eastern Ukraine, “Putin will squander the Russian space programme in the same manner he squandered the remainder of the Soviet legacy,” analyst Mitrokhin contends.

Nevertheless, Russia has not been entirely severed from international space collaboration.

Despite the dissolution of several partnerships, NASA and Roscosmos have maintained their cooperation aboard the International Space Station, while Moscow has increasingly looked to China and other non-Western partners for emerging collaborative ventures.

Source link