Is Russia stalking satellites which help Ukraine from space?

A Russian military satellite has manoeuvred to within metres of a US-registered radar satellite believed to provide intelligence to Ukraine, according to space-tracking data reported by The War Zone, a US defence news site.

Cosmos 2612 may have passed ICEYE-X36, a satellite owned by the US arm of the Finnish company ICEYE.

LeoLabs, a US space-tracking company, put the closest approach at about 500 metres, according to Breaking Defence.

ICEYE has supplied radar imagery to Ukraine since 2022, Defence News reported.

So is Russia stalking satellites which help Ukraine from space? Al Jazeera spoke to analysts to find out:

What has happened?

A Russian satellite has deliberately positioned itself close to a Western one, after months of manoeuvring.

Cosmos 2612 is one of six satellites the Russian military launched in April, The War Zone reported.

In May, four of them moved close to an ICEYE satellite.

ICEYE-X36 is a commercial satellite, owned by a private company rather than a government, but ICEYE sells radar imagery to militaries and supplies data to the US and its allies.

ICEYE’s chief executive, Rafal Modrzewski, told the Reuters news agency the company then moved its own satellite, which appeared to prompt further Russian manoeuvres.

Then, between Thursday and Friday last week, Cosmos 2612 closed in from more than 320km (200 miles) from ICEYE-X36 to about 4.8km (3 miles), the space-tracking company LeoLabs told the news site Axios.

Over the weekend, it moved between positions ahead of and behind the ICEYE satellite, at times coming within roughly 500 metres, LeoLabs said in a report on Monday, adding that the estimate was uncertain and, by Monday, it had begun to move away.

A Ukrainian official told Axios that Ukraine’s military works with ICEYE and uses its capabilities, but said it was unclear whether ICEYE-X36 itself supports Ukraine.

Has Russia done this before, and what is the purpose?

In the past, Russia has mainly carried out such manoeuvres against Western military satellites, rather than commercially owned ones, Mark Hilborne, a senior lecturer in the defence studies department at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera.

In early 2020, two Russian satellites moved close to USA 245, a US spy satellite.

In September 2025, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said two Russian Luch-Olymp satellites were tracking two Intelsat satellites used by the German military.

Dr Marco Langbroek, a lecturer in optical space situational awareness at TU Delft Faculty of Aerospace Engineering, said: “At geostationary altitude, we have seen two Russian satellites (LUCH/OLYMP-K 1 & 2) repeatedly approach western communication satellites to distances of a few tens of kilometres in the past few years, likely with the intention to eavesdrop on communications and data transfers. And we have seen the Russians practising very close approaches in Low Earth Orbit – similar to what they now did to ICEYE-X36 – with their own satellites as test targets.”

However, this incident is different, because “approaching another satellite this close without the cooperation of the owner or operator of the other satellite, is widely considered ‘not done’ as it is dangerous, with a risk of collision or interference.

“It is equivalent to placing your car on the freeway within 10 cm of another driving car: highly unsafe.”

Langbroek said it is not known what the purpose of the Russian manoeuvre was, however, “it could be a dry run for a future attack, it could be provocation or scare tactics to ruffle the feathers of Ukraine and its allies, and/or a test to see how the satellite operators react to a threat like this.”

This sort of manoeuvre, therefore, falls into the pattern of “hybrid warfare” – “the same kind of provocations and inciting reactions like what Russia does when they fly a drone into Polish airspace or zoom a NATO warship at low elevation in the Baltic Sea”.

How common are these incidents?

Close approaches have happened for years, but not like this.

Hilborne said this is “the first time that a country has done such a manoeuvre … against the commercial satellite without any consent”.

It was also “incredibly close”, he said, with some reports putting the distance at less than 30 metres.

Far more common is interference that does not require going near a satellite at all. This is mostly done through jamming, which drowns out a satellite’s signals, often from the ground.

Western military officials told Reuters that Russian interference with Western space systems has increased significantly since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

What is the significance of this?

For Hilborne, the choice of target “is starting to indicate that Russia does not distinguish between commercial and military satellites as potential targets”.

That matters because militaries, including Ukraine’s, increasingly rely on commercial satellites for communications and imagery.

Moscow has warned about this.

In October 2022, a senior Russian foreign ministry official told the United Nations that “quasi-civilian infrastructure may be a legitimate target for a retaliatory strike”.

Juliana Suess, a space security researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP) in Berlin, said Russia may be calculating that reactions will be less severe if it shadows a commercial satellite rather than a sovereign one, especially one not belonging to the US.

But ownership is not that simple.

ICEYE-X36 is owned by ICEYE’s US subsidiary and registered as a US satellite, Hilborne noted, adding, “this creates a complex problem”.

The distance matters too. A gap of less than 5km may sound far, Suess said, but “it’s essentially a hop and a skip in space”.

“It’s incredibly close and could potentially enable Russia to conduct nefarious activity, including intercepting data from the satellite or disrupting its service – temporarily via signal jamming, for example,” she added.

“A kinetic attack would also be possible but seems less likely at this point in time, in part because this would be an unprecedented measure taken against a satellite”, she explained.

Is Russia just sending a message, or escalating?

Probably both.

“It is sending a message that these platforms could be held under threat,” Hilborne said, adding that it also represents an escalation, suggesting Russia might be willing to attack, since any satellite could be used as a weapon simply by crashing it into another.

Suess added: “I think regardless of whether we see further manoeuvring or consequences, the political goal of intimidation should not be underestimated”.

“The manoeuvre is also a message that space assets cannot be considered wholly safe or removed from the war in Ukraine”, she said.

She pointed to November 2021, when Russia destroyed one of its own satellites with a missile, an event referred to in the European Union’s 2023 space strategy.

“We have long known what Russia is capable of in terms of disrupting or even destroying space assets. This manoeuvre is also a reminder of those previously demonstrated capabilities,” she said.

Moscow calls such spacecraft “inspector satellites”, and in 2020 described such manoeuvres as common practice “by many countries”, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported.

Hilborne described the approach as “another example of activity that sits below the threshold of conflict”.

An outright attack on ICEYE-X36 looks unlikely for now, Hilborne said.

“With the current balance in the conflict, and this being an American-registered satellite, it would seem unlikely that Russia would actually attack the satellite, as the response would be unpredictable”, he said.

An attack could also create a large amount of space debris, which would be a problem for everyone, he added, warning that “it’s hard to second-guess where Russia draws the line”.

How has Ukraine fought to keep its eyes in space?

Ukraine’s access to satellites has come under pressure before, at times from its own allies.

In March 2025, as Washington paused intelligence sharing with Kyiv, the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency “temporarily suspended” Ukraine’s access to the main portal for US government-purchased commercial imagery.

If ICEYE-X36 were disrupted, Ukraine would not necessarily go blind, Suess said, because the ICEYE constellation has more than one satellite, and sovereign radar satellites, such as Germany’s, could also provide data.

But speed is the issue. According to ICEYE, the expanded access agreed this year meant faster access, Suess explained.

“The question is whether a similarly fast transfer of data could be enabled with a new provider, whether commercial or sovereign in nature,” she said.

Now, Ukraine faces another squeeze. Last week, the order to limit Starshield – the military-grade version of SpaceX’s Starlink service – for Ukraine came from inside the White House, two US officials and a Western official told Reuters.

On Saturday, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Starshield is currently unavailable to Ukraine, but that Kyiv’s request to use it for attacks deep inside Russia is “under discussion”.