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Way home: The space shuttle Soyuz with course Baikonur on Wednesday (Screenshot from video of Nasa)
Photo: NASA
Despite severe tensions between Russia and the West, a US astronaut has left the International Space Station on board a Russian spacecraft.
The American Mark Vande Hei and the cosmonauts Anton Shkaplerov and Pjotr Dubrov undocked from the ISS with a Russian Soyuz space capsule on Wednesday, as live images from the US space agency Nasa showed.
The three astronauts are expected to land in the early afternoon after a flight of almost five hours at the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Both sides had previously rejected speculation that Vande Hei would not be able to fly back to Earth with the Russian Soyuz spacecraft in view of the Ukraine war.
Shkaplerov handed over command of the ISS to US astronaut Thomas Marshburn before departure on Tuesday.
Even if people on Earth had "problems," the ISS would remain a "symbol of cooperation," Schkaplerov said in a short speech during the ceremony in front of the assembled crew.
After that there were lots of hugs.
Vande Hei and Dubrow arrived together on the ISS on April 9, 2021.
Vande Hei, 55, has overtaken Scott Kelly on his space trip, who previously held the record for the longest stay by an American in space at 341 consecutive days.
In addition to Marshburn, the US astronauts Raja Chari and Kayla Barron, the German astronaut Matthias Maurer and the three cosmonauts Oleg Artemyev, Denis Matveyev and Sergey Korsakov remained on the ISS.
NASA currently has no capacity to transport its astronauts to and from the ISS without Russian help.
However, a private flight from the USA to the space station is planned for Wednesday evening: The company Axiom Space is sending its own module there, carried by the rocket "Falcon 9" from the space company SpaceX by Elon Musk.
SpaceX is also providing the Dragon space capsule, which will be the first to see an all-civilian crew visiting the ISS.
Each of the four crew members pays 55 million euros for the one-week stay.
ak/dpa