The head of Russia’s space agency has approved a masterplan for the creation of a new space station.
Since 2022, the country has turned its its back on international cooperation in space-related activities, a further sign of its increasing geopolitical isolation. This latest move comes amid ratcheting Western sanctions against the pariah state, which have attempted to hamper its economy and military arsenal since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The announcement was posted to the social media platform Telegram by the state-owned news agency RIA Novosti.
The post read: “The head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, approved the schedule for the creation of the Russian orbital station.”
Roscomsos is Russia’s official space agency, spun out in the 1990s from the Soviet Union space program.
It is currently headed by Yuri Ivanovich Borisov, a prominent Russian politician who previously served as the country’s deputy prime minister and deputy minister of defense.
Ivan Timoshenko/Roscosmos space corporation via AP
Borisov is currently sanctioned by Canada in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and one of 1,500 individuals considered by Canada to be in “grave breach of international peace and security.”
According to the Telegram post, the new space station will be “fully ready” in 2033, and “contracts have also been signed for the creation of the station itself, and a new ship for flights to it on the Angara rocket from the Vostochny cosmodrome.”
The Vostochny Cosmodrome is a spaceport located on the near the Russia-China border.
Aleksey Nikolskyi/Sputnik via AP
Russia has expressed its intentions to go it alone in space since April 2021, when Roscosmos announced plans to exit the International Space Station program after 2024.
The I.S.S. is a low Earth orbit space station, run as a collaboration between the space agencies of the U.S., Russia, Japan, Europe, and Canada.
In 2022, the Russian agency confirmed its intention to withdraw, citing the impact of Western sanctions.
“Sanctions from the U.S., Canada, the European Union and Japan are aimed at blocking financial, economic and production activities of our high-tech enterprises,” then-space chief Dmitry Rogozin wrote on Twitter. “The purpose of the sanctions is to kill the Russian economy, plunge our people into despair and hunger, and bring our country to its knees.”
Following this, Russia announced plans to develop its own station, though some doubted whether they had the capital needed for such a project.
Roscosmos Space Agency Press Service via AP
In February 2024, Roscosmos said it would be selling off $124 million worth of “non-core” assets, after losing nearly 80 percent of its export income following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
However, the announcement that a new station will be ready within a decade, may indicate that the country is more than capable of upgrading its aerospace capabilities.
A recent report from The Royal United Services Institute, a leading thinktank, argued that through a combination of poor and tardy implementation, sanctions against Russia following its invasion of Ukraine had been “manifestly ineffective.”
Speaking to Newsweek, one of the authors said that the country had been able to easily procure the advanced systems and components needed to replenish its military arsenal, and that “it is virtually impossible for sanctions to ‘de-arm’ the country.”
With this new space station, and reports that Putin has the capacity to develop an anti-satellite weapon, a new frontier has emerged in the contest between Russian and the West.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
