Russia is no longer limited to carrying out land and air attacks against Ukraine. While the war launched in February 2022 seems to be at a standstill, Moscow would like to find progress and turn the situation to its advantage. The Russian army is working there by putting the means. She could quickly open a new forehead… Spatial this time. The American online magazine Forbes reports that the Kremlin would intensify its military efforts to try to damage the network of SpaceX satellites located above Ukraine, far beyond the atmosphere.
The objective is obviously to penalize the country’s means of communication. Russia has been looking since the start of the large -scale conflict to dive from Ukraine in dark, by regularly bombing its energy infrastructure. But despite these targeted campaigns, the Ukrainian army manages to maintain access to its communications, in particular thanks to satellites. Intolerable for Vladimir Putin who sees with a very bad eye the assistance of Westerners, American in mind, embodied among others by the Starlink network.
According to Victoria Samson, director of Spatial Security and Stability at Secure World Foundation, contacted by Forbes, Moscow would carry out trials of its anti-catellite missile system A-235 PL-19 Nudol. The latter would have already been used in the past during an exercise whose aim was to destroy an old Soviet spacecraft in terrestrial orbit. In theory, this projectile could just as well reach one of some 7,000 satellites deployed by SpaceX.
An upcoming spatial nuclear war?
The Russian Ministry of Defense has been very clear on the subject: Nudol missile could perfectly carry out actions aimed at putting the satellites of the American billionaire Elon Musk out of service.
In order not to fix anything, the various American intelligence services suspect Russia from being behind a clandestine project aimed at designing spacecraft armed with nuclear charges, capable of tracking Western satellites in low terrestrial orbit. The New York Times, in an article dated February 14, 2024, indicated that this possibility particularly worried the United States, which feared a spatial climbing with the Russians.
Faced with these legitimate fears, US officials challenged Russia on its obligations in this area, by depositing a resolution to the UN Security Council, calling for all states to reaffirm their commitment to the ban on deploying nuclear weapons in orbit, as provided for in the Treaty on the Space signed in the middle of the Cold War, in 1967.
Russia has opposed this resolution to this resolution, while continuing to deny its involvement in a supposed clandestine project mixing spatial and nuclear warning ambition. Victoria Samson alerts the deployment of Russian nuclear missiles in space. The latter could destroy thousands of satellites and lead to the almost immediate death of all astronauts present nearby.
