Ukraine is using its new long-range cruise missile and its expanding fleets of high-tech drones in an exploding barrage of strikes on Russian space centers and strategic airfields as part of Space War I (Photo by Murat Usubali/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Anadolu via Getty Images

Ukraine’s precision bombing of a major Russian space center for assembling rockets is just the latest in an exploding barrage of missile and drone strikes on the Kremlin’s aerospace labs, say leading American experts on Russia’s military and space operations.

Four years after the Kremlin starting blasting Ukraine’s “Rocket City” of Dnipro, including a spacecraft skunkworks, Ukraine is stepping up its retaliation, with aerial assaults on a constellation of Russian space-tech outposts, including some on the periphery of Moscow, says Elena Grossfeld, a scholar at the prestigious King’s Centre for the Study of Intelligence, at King’s College London.

Part of the skyrocketing Space War I, Ukraine’s attack on the Progress Rocket and Space Center, in western Russia, might have triggered a major setback for the Russian space program.

The center produces the Soyuz series of rockets, for decades the main Russian boosters to launch space capsules destined for the International Space Station and imaging satellites that track American defense outposts worldwide and the movement of Moscow’s own tanks and missile brigades around occupied Ukraine.

Grossfeld told me in an interview that Ukraine’s latest missile strike represents the newest ramp-up in its campaign to target the Kremlin’s most important space operations, especially those tied to its military and war objectives.

MORE FOR YOU

“This latest attack on Russian space-related manufacturing is just another step in a long series,” she says.

“The main research center of Roscosmos [the Russian government-run spacecraft corporation] in Korolev (a Moscow suburb) was hit earlier this month.”

“Space communications centers have been hit, including in Dubna (another Moscow suburb) in June 2026, and additional centers have been similarly hit.”

Moscow’s recovery from these multiple strikes could be stymied by the broad barriers on tech exports to Russia that have been imposed by the Western democracies following the invasion of Ukraine.

That means Roscosmos will have to resort to searching for spacecraft components and advanced chips in the nefarious underground black market, Grossfeld says.

In an earlier strike, a kamikaze drone was despatched by Ukrainian pilots to destroy a leading-edge radio telescope that Ukrainian scientists had designed for communications across missions to Mars and Venus.

But the telescope was captured by invading Russian troops during their takeover of Crimea, and they adapted it to refine their GLONASS satellite navigation system, “to be used for military communications,” says Victoria Samson, Chief Director, Space Security and Stability at the Washington-based think tank Secure World Foundation.

Samson, a globally renowned expert on the leading potential space conflicts of the future at a think tank that specializes in proposing solutions to maintain peace in orbit, told me in an interview that a spiraling space war is now seeing “an expansion of the types of facilities that are being targeted.”

Russia launched this space war on the very same day its tanks and troops began crashing across the border into Ukraine, she says, when the Kremlin’s notorious military intelligence directorate began attacking the ground stations of the American satellite network Viasat.

Ukraine’s president and military leaders all used that network to organize the embattled nation’s defense, and they would have been decimated if SpaceX founder Elon Musk hadn’t launched a high-speed Berlin Airlift-like operation to rush thousands of life-saving Starlink terminals to plug Ukraine back into the Web.

The Progress Rocket and Space Center, Samson says, “does build the Soyuz rockets that are being used to launch Russia's (limited) version of Starlink, Rassvet.”

Ukraine’s freedom fighters are equipped with Starlink terminals that give them a remarkable military advantage in communications and navigation over the Russian invaders.

So Moscow now aims to loft its own version of Starlink, but “they are very far from being able to get the constellation launched in its entirety,” Samson says.

Meanwhile, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has hailed the strike on the space center in a post on X: “Our plan of long-range sanctions against Russia for this war is being implemented, and it is important that Russia’s war potential be reduced.”

Zelensky also lauded the development of Ukraine’s new FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile, which precisely hit the target space outpost 900 kilometers beyond Ukraine’s border with Russia.

The iconic head of Ukraine’s resistance and worldwide hero of democracy added that a parallel aerial assault hit the Savasleyka airbase, “where the carriers of Russian missiles that strike our cities and villages are based – about 700 kilometers from Ukraine.”

“With Ukrainian deep strikes capabilities improving,” says Elena Grossfeld, “no Russian region can be safe, and of course, space facilities and manufacturing are targeted.”

“While Russia is targeting purely civilian infrastructure and sites” across Ukraine, killing countless citizens and children in the process, she adds, “Ukraine is restricting its strikes to military or dual-purpose targets.”

When considering missile strikes on space centers, she says, “If the facility is manufacturing equipment used for military communications, it is my understanding that it becomes a legitimate military target.”

“The space war has been ongoing since the beginning of Russian invasion,” Grossfeld says, but playing out across a terrestrial theater.

As European members of NATO race to build up their space defenses, the world is waiting for the first armed clash to be staged in orbit, even as Russia conducts a clandestine project to arm an anti-satellite missile with a nuclear warhead.

At the same time, the United States has begun masterplanning its Golden Dome orbital defense system, a fantastical shield against nuclear ICBMs and ASATs that could cost more than $1 trillion.

As the ground segment of the space war speeds up, Grossfeld says, and as Ukraine perfects the navigation and autonomy of its killer drones and cruise missiles, “Any damage to existing facilities … makes Russia’s space operations, whether launches, or satellite production or others, more risky, expensive, and complicated.”

“Ukraine is pulling ahead in all its strikes - not just on space.”

“Since both sides now view space as a necessary domain for waging war, the strikes on Russian space-adjacent facilities and industries are likely to continue."

Meanwhile, the King’s College London scholar, who has written extensively on Moscow’s advances and setbacks in military space projects, says while Russia has been waging a space war against Ukraine, it has also ignited a shadow space war against the U.S., in the Middle East.

Russia is likely providing Iran with sophisticated satellite intel that is aiding the Islamic Republic’s drone strikes on American missile defense systems across the Mideast, assaults that have hit U.S. radar installations and THAAD missile interceptors, Grossfeld told me in an earlier interview.

She also points out that President Zelensky has said he has evidence that Russia supplied the precise coordinates for an Iranian attack on a U.S. Air Force AWACS surveillance aircraft stationed at Saudi Arabia’s Prince Sultan Airbase.

Zelensky outlined that evidence in a series of posts on X, and then in a video interview with NBC News.

Russia’s imaging satellites could have provided targeting info for all these aerial assaults, she says, as part of a joint Russian-Iranian space war against the West.

At the same time, Russia has improved the aeronautics of Iran’s “Shahed drones used against the U.S. military in the Gulf.”

So, she added, “Yes, the space war is ongoing.”

“But it has been a Cold War of sorts until now, as no satellites have been blown out yet.”

“Still, if you look at what Russian military bloggers and propagandists are saying, there are demands for Russia to inflict kinetic damage on Starlink, and other U.S. space assets.”

Just as the Cold War I competition between the Soviet Russians and the Americans revolved around their race to build the planet’s biggest stockpile of thermonuclear weapons, Russia’s next pivot in the new space war might be to equip its already tested Nudol anti-satellite missile with a nuclear warhead.

The Kremlin’s atomic ASAT could stalk and threaten all of the Western spacecraft in low Earth orbit, and could, with just one detonation, destroy great swaths of America’s trillion-dollar Golden Dome orbital defense system, along with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation, Samson says.

A thermonuclear blast in orbit could simultaneously wipe out most satellite communications worldwide, take out American missile tracking systems, and kill all the astronauts aboard the International Space Station and the Chinese space station.

Such an overwhelming threat, Samson says, makes it absolutely imperative for the U.S. to destroy this space super-bomb while it is still on a Russian launch pad.