Ukraine Shifts Tactics to Target Russia’s Aerospace and Space Infrastructure

A Russian police officer stands guard in front of a life-sized model of the Soviet-made Buran space orbiter. In Kyiv, Ukraine, Russian Aerospace Forces (RAF) chief Aleksandr Chayko narrowly survived an explosion that claimed the life of his son-in-law. Chayko, who marked his 55th birthday in the final week of July, was reportedly attending a delayed birthday celebration on August 1 at an upscale Italian restaurant situated in central Moscow. However, the event was abruptly halted when an unidentified woman carrying an improvised explosive device attempted to gain entry to the venue. According to Russian accounts, she was intercepted by a security guard, causing the explosives in her bag to detonate and instantly killing at least five individuals. While the Kremlin refrained from officially confirming the death toll, it placed the blame for the attack squarely on the “bloody tentacles” of the government led by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Kyiv has offered no commentary regarding the incident.

Russia’s space programme has increasingly come into the firing line. Chayko previously helped spearhead Russia’s military intervention in Syria and commanded troops stationed north of Kyiv during the early stages of 2022. Ukraine has accused him of committing war crimes. By May, President Vladimir Putin designated him as the commander-in-chief of the RAF, which exercises control over the military apparatus of Russia’s space sector. Facilities operated by the RAF—including satellites and ground-space installations—have been heavily utilized for intelligence gathering, navigation, and the coordination of ground forces, drones, and missile strikes. Because these facilities are situated primarily in western Russia, newly deployed Ukrainian long-range missiles and drones possess the capability to target them directly.

“Key factories are few, and they all are within the reach of Ukrainian missiles,” Nikolay Mitrokhin, a researcher affiliated with Germany’s University of Bremen, told Al Jazeera. “These attacks may result – and certainly will – in the problems with all of Russia’s space programme, including specifically civilian and international programmes,” he added.

In late June, Ukrainian drones launched a strike against the massive space communications center located in the quiet, tree-lined town of Dubna outside Moscow, a facility responsible for managing reconnaissance satellites and processing military data. The attack resulted in damage to a 32-metre (105-foot) satellite antenna, hardware modular complexes, central control consoles, and technical buildings. “Our long-range sanctions against Russia for this war once again reached the Dubna space communications centre,” Zelenskyy remarked on June 30. Russian officials acknowledged that an unspecified building in Dubna suffered damage and reported the death of a six-month-old infant. Additional Ukrainian drone strikes targeted three smaller space communication centers situated across western Russia and annexed Crimea.

“These centres are very expensive, very labour-consuming from the viewpoint of construction,” Anatoly Zak, a United States-based author and prominent expert on the Russian space programme, explained to Al Jazeera. “It’s very difficult to transfer their functions to another infrastructure” because they manage geostationary satellites “tied” to a certain location. Although there are currently no indications that the satellites have drifted out of orbit or become unmanageable, Zak noted that “behind the scenes there are for sure serious communication problems.”

On August 23, swarms of Ukrainian drones traversed a distance exceeding 1,800km (1,120 miles) to target Russia’s northwestern Arkhangelsk region. Regional authorities claimed to have intercepted roughly 40 drones, though at least two managed to reach the vicinity of Plesetsk, Russia’s military cosmodrome, spaceport, and launchpad designated for intercontinental ballistic missiles and military satellite carriers. No physical damage was reported from this breach. A day later, the state-run space corporation Roscosmos announced the successful liftoff of a rocket carrying undisclosed “military satellites.” The timing of this Ukrainian raid—along with two similar operations earlier in the year—appeared deliberately orchestrated to strike a booster rocket that had been fully fueled and raised for launch.

“There have been three attempts to air-raid Plesetsk, and not just air-raid, but air-raid at the moment when there’s a fully-fuelled rocket on the launchpad that is about to start,” Zak stated. These attempts were deemed serious enough to warrant a direct, public report to Putin. “Our [Ukrainian] ‘friends’ did everything to make this launch not happen,” Dmitry Bakanov, head of the Kremlin-operated Roscosmos space agency, informed Putin during an April briefing. According to Pavel Luzin, an analyst with the Washington, DC-based Jamestown Foundation, it would require a minimum of a dozen drones to successfully damage Plesetsk’s launch table or rocket assembly workshop. Moscow has asserted that the military satellites launched from Plesetsk form part of the Rassvet (Dawn) satellite fleet, engineered to compete with and supplant the Starlink satellite modems developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Historically, Sputnik 1—the Earth’s first artificial satellite and the world’s most launched spaceship prototype—was comparable in size to a fitness ball and contained little more than a radio transmitter and three silver-zinc batteries. The resulting “Sputnik moment” marked the realization by the United States following the 1957 Soviet launch that the USSR had assumed the lead in science and space technology. Nevertheless, Sputnik 1 relied on a modified R-7, which served as the world’s first intercontinental ballistic missile designed to transport a hydrogen bomb across continents. That very rocket technology capable of delivering a nuclear warhead to the US was subsequently repurposed to propel a satellite into orbit. The R-7 eventually evolved into the prototype for Soyuz booster rockets, acknowledged as the world’s most frequently launched spaceships, enabling Soviet and Russian launches to maintain routine precision, unlike the US space shuttle program.

“Rain or sleet or snow don’t matter,” Mark Bowman, deputy director of NASA’s human spaceflight programme, told this reporter back in 2007 at the Baikonur spaceport, recognized as the world's oldest active facility located in southern Kazakhstan and leased by Russia. The sole manufacturing site for Soyuz rockets remains the Progress Rocket and Space Centre situated in the Volga River city of Samara, which was struck by Ukrainian missiles on August 15. The assault triggered a fire and inflicted minor damage on one of the structures. “So far, we see that the damage in Samara wasn’t critical,” Luzin observed. Should the damage escalate to a critical level, Russia would lose its capability to manufacture Soyuz rockets, though existing stockpiles would sustain operations for approximately another year, he added.

During the Soviet era, Communist Moscow largely downplayed the military dimensions of its space program, choosing instead to emphasize the “peaceful exploration of space.” The USSR achieved notable milestones by sending the first dog, man, and woman into space, alongside launching the world’s first space station. By 1988, its Buran space shuttle achieved the distinction of completing the first unmanned orbital flight with automated landing capabilities. Furthermore, its unmanned probes successfully executed soft landings on Venus and Mars while capturing the earliest photographs of the moon’s hidden side. Several pivotal figures behind the Soviet space program originated from territories now comprising Ukraine, and a network of crucial design bureaus and manufacturing plants continued operations there following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. The 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and the subsequent rupture in bilateral relations prompted Ukrainian aerospace facilities to sever historical ties with Moscow, disrupting decades-old supply chains for booster rockets, guidance systems, electronics, and other essential components.

The broader Russian invasion of Ukraine has further intensified the international isolation facing the country's civilian space initiatives, with Western governments and space agencies moving to suspend or abandon numerous planned missions and collaborative partnerships. Following the outbreak of the war in 2022, the European Space Agency officially terminated its cooperation with Roscosmos regarding the ExoMars initiative, removing the Russian-built Kazachok landing platform from a mission intended to search for signs of historic life on Mars. Concurrently, Berlin deactivated its X-ray telescope mounted on Spektr-RG, a joint Russian-German space observatory utilized for mapping galaxy clusters and surveying the universe for black holes. Analyst Mitrokhin contends that in pursuit of securing minor territorial gains in eastern Ukraine, “Putin will waste the Russian space programme the way he wasted the rest of the Soviet legacy.” Despite these setbacks, Russia has not been entirely cut off from global space cooperation; while certain alliances have collapsed, NASA and Roscosmos maintain their partnership aboard the International Space Station, and Moscow has simultaneously forged new cooperative projects with China and other non-Western allies.