Provocative photo in space: Russian ISS cosmonauts celebrate the fall of Luhansk with a flag show

Created: 07/05/2022Updated: 07/05/2022 13:31

By: Stephanie Munk

Cosmonauts on the ISS take a clear position for Putin in the Ukraine war: in one photo they hold up the flag of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic and congratulate Russia.

Moscow - The Ukraine conflict is currently dominating large parts of world affairs - now it has also reached outer space.

The International Space Station (ISS) was one of the last places where Russians and Americans still worked peacefully together.

This motto could now be ended with a provocative photo: Russian cosmonauts on the ISS pose with a flag of the self-proclaimed "People's Republic" of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine.

Russian cosmonauts display the flags of the self-proclaimed separatist regions of Donetsk and Luhansk on the ISS - a clear provocation in the ongoing Ukraine war.

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ISS after the Ukraine war: Russia already threatened to crash

For more than 20 years, Russia and the United States have jointly operated the International Space Station.

Americans, Russians and Germans are currently living and working there together, around 400 kilometers above the earth.

The US space agency Nasa emphasized in March - shortly after the outbreak of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine - that ISS operations continue as normal.

"We have maintained operations under such circumstances before, and both sides have always behaved very professionally," said space program director Kathy Lueders at the time.

The Russian space agency Roskosmos was not quite so reticent and even presented the horror scenario of a possible crash of the ISS in the room, should cooperation with Russia in space be terminated because of the Ukraine war.

"We celebrate in space": Russian space agency Roskosmos provokes with flag photo

With the current photo from the ISS, Russia is now accepting a clear affront to the West.

Just after the day on which Russia announced control over the entire Luhansk region by capturing the city of Lysychansk, the Russian cosmonauts unfurled the flag of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic on the ISS.

They also congratulated the Russian soldiers on taking the region.

The flag of Donetsk can also be seen in the picture.

The territories are not internationally recognized - the only exceptions are Russia and Syria.

"We celebrate both on earth and in space," writes the Russian space agency Roskosmos on the photo on its Telegram channel.

Russian soldiers and pro-Russian separatists have taken complete control of the "last big city" in the "People's Republic" of Luhansk, said cosmonauts Oleg Artemiyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov.

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"We are convinced that July 3, 2022 will forever go down in the history of the republic," it said on the Roskosmos Telegram channel.

Residents of the neighboring Donetsk “People's Republic” were told to “wait”.

Of course, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a completely different opinion: On the night of Tuesday (July 5) he announced in a video message that Ukraine would defend the Donetsk region and recapture Luhansk.

Regardless of the many conflicts between Russia and the USA, space travel has so far been considered one of the few areas in which cooperation between the two countries works.

Even during the Cold War, the then blocs in East and West had worked together in space - for example when docking an Apollo and a Soyuz spacecraft in 1975.

After Vladimir Putin sent troops to Ukraine in February, the West imposed sanctions on the Russian space agency.

The ISS is a joint project of the USA, Canada, Japan, the European Space Agency (ESA) and Russia.

The station is divided into a Russian and a US segment.

The outpost of mankind around 400 kilometers above the earth is actually considered a peace project.

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