Russia is escalating its confrontation with the West in orbit. Its satellites are pursuing spacecraft from companies helping Ukraine — and Starlink has been put on notice.

There has long been talk of “hunter” satellites and an intensifying confrontation in space between Russia and the United States. But this week brought an unprecedented escalation in the new “star wars.” On October 18, a Russian inspector satellite came closer than ever to a spacecraft operated by the Finnish-American company ICEYE. The company openly helps Ukraine, giving its armed forces access to satellite images of Russian military facilities, including airfields, naval ports, and oil refineries. Here’s what we know about the exceptionally close encounter, how Moscow is describing it, and why independent experts are alarmed.Russian Kosmos satellites have pursued this spacecraft before, but never like thisOvernight into October 18, the Russian satellite Kosmos-2612 approached the radar imaging satellite ICEYE-X36 after a series of maneuvers that began four days earlier. The Ukrainian military uses data from the ICEYE satellite.This was not their first close encounter. In the spring, four Russian spacecraft were “hunting” this same satellite: Kosmos-2612, 2610, 2611, and 2613 all approached it. Earlier, in February, news outlets reported on maneuvers by Luch spacecraft pursuing telecommunications satellites operated by Intelsat and Eutelsat.This time, Kosmos-2612 came exceptionally close to its target: hundreds or even tens of meters away, rather than tens of kilometers as before. Observational astronomer Marco Langbroek estimates that at their closest approach, at 1:35 a.m. GMT on October 18, the spacecraft were between 26 and 470 meters apart. Measurement errors make a more precise estimate impossible. Bart Hendrickx, an independent researcher of Russia’s space program, told Meduza that he knew of no previous encounter at such close range in low Earth orbit. In earlier encounters, he said, satellites had remained at least several dozen kilometers apart.He said the complexity and methodical persistence of the maneuvers by Kosmos-2612 and its fellow satellites, numbered 2610, 2611, 2613, and 2614, were also surprising. All these spacecraft, along with satellite 2609, were launched aboard a single rocket from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome on April 16.“The satellites used a considerable amount of fuel on these maneuvers. By May, it was already clear that these weren’t ordinary Earth-observation and communications satellites, which generally conserve their fuel. Perhaps [through this latest escalation] Russia is demonstrating its ability to change orbits quickly and unpredictably to threaten enemy satellites,” Hendrickx said.Moscow calls these maneuvers “a tool of strategic deterrence” and a warning to commercial companiesThe Russian military previously acknowledged launching inspector satellites but said their sole purpose was “monitoring the condition of Russian satellites” — and said they had carried out such monitoring. Now, following Kosmos-2612’s dangerous maneuvers, the government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta has published an article by Yuri Knutov, a military expert, retired colonel, and director of the Air Defense Forces Museum in Balashikha, outside Moscow. The article says Russia’s actions “do not violate international law” and that the inspector satellites themselves are “a tool of strategic deterrence.”“Russia is demonstrating its ability to ‘blind’ or at least identify sources of threats. The approach to ICEYE-X36 sends a clear signal: Any commercial company making its capabilities available for intelligence gathering against Russia must recognize that its spacecraft may be subjected to forced inspection in orbit,” Knutov wrote. He said both ICEYE satellites and the Starlink constellation, which is critical to Ukrainian military command and communications, had effectively become part of NATO’s intelligence apparatus.Like analyst Georgy Trishkin, whose views we quoted here, Knutov believes the Kosmos maneuvers were intended to force the ICEYE satellite to take evasive action to avoid a collision and quickly use up its fuel, turning it into “a useless piece of metal that will eventually burn up in the upper atmosphere.”Knutov said the Russian satellites were less vulnerable to such a tactic because modern inspector spacecraft have much larger fuel reserves than their predecessors. Earlier models could perform only two or three orbital maneuvers before running out of fuel, he said, whereas newer satellites can remain in orbit for extended periods, carry out complex close approaches, and track other spacecraft over long stretches.This latest episode in the space cold war was clearly visible from Earth. On Monday, Spaceweather.com asked whether the close encounter between Kosmos and ICEYE would be visible through binoculars or a backyard telescope. By Tuesday, it had its answer: yes.This image, taken by the Swiss company s2a systems, shows the encounter. The bright object in front is the ICEYE-X36 radar satellite. Its apparent magnitude is about 7, making it invisible to the naked eye but easy to see through binoculars or an amateur telescope. The fainter object behind it is Kosmos-2612.Russia isn’t the only country with space programs like theseOther countries, particularly the United States and China, have their own programs to develop inspector satellites. These spacecraft are designed to approach other objects in space that aren’t built for such encounters — those without docking ports, for example. These approaches can have various purposes: intercepting radio transmissions, inspecting another spacecraft, diagnosing problems, or even destroying it.Militaries initiated and funded nearly all of these programs, so the public first learned they existed from amateur astronomers tracking the strange behavior of uncataloged satellites. Since 2011, when these observers identified an American satellite nicknamed Prowler this way, dozens more inspector satellites and many cases of pursuit have been detected, most involving Russian spacecraft.Russian satellite maneuvers are easier to track because of censorship in the Pentagon’s main space catalogUnequal access to information partly explains this pattern of observations. The U.S. military maintains Space-Track, the main publicly accessible catalog of artificial objects in space. It withholds the full orbital parameters of some U.S. military and intelligence satellites or publishes them with a delay. Until 2018, the Pentagon even classified data on civilian spacecraft launched as secondary payloads alongside military ones.The U.S. military does not conceal Russian satellites’ orbital data, so anyone with the relevant skills can use the available data to plot their movements rather than track them through a telescope.In 2018, the State Department protested the “very abnormal behavior” of Russian satellites. The U.S. military has protested their “threatening” maneuvers and anti-satellite weapons tests (we wrote about these nesting-doll satellites). Then, in 2024, Washington accused Moscow of preparing to deploy nuclear weapons in space.Yet the United States has operated GSSAP satellites since 2014. These are essentially the same kind of inspector satellites, used to monitor satellites in geostationary orbit. And in June 2026, the U.S. military launched Jackal, built by True Anomaly, and Puma, made by Rocket Lab, as part of the Victus Haze exercise to practice space “hunting” scenarios.In September of this year, the Pentagon acknowledged for the first time that it had deployed weapons in space — both kinetic and nonkinetic. The next few years in Earth orbit will clearly be tense.Inspector satellites are also being developed for entirely civilian purposes. One example is LINK, a spacecraft meant to attempt a rescue of the Swift space telescope, but its mission ended in failure.It’s hard to predict what the Kosmos satellites will do nextWhat happens next depends largely on how much fuel the Russian satellites have left. They may continue maneuvering around ICEYE spacecraft. According to Langbroek, as of midday on October 21, Kosmos-2612 had stopped moving away from its target and was holding at a distance of 480 kilometers. Hendrickx cautioned that the pursuit might not be over: Kosmos-2612 could return if it had enough fuel. He also pointed to four other Russian satellites launched alongside it — Kosmos-2610, 2611, 2613, and 2614 — that operate in similar orbits and probably have the same mission. Both ICEYE-X36 and ICEYE-X37 could be targets, he said.At Meduza, we are committed to transparency about our use of artificial intelligence in the newsroom. The story you’re reading was written by one of our living, breathing journalists and translated from Russian using an AI model configured to follow our strict editorial standards. This translation process is the result of extensive testing and refinements to ensure our English-language coverage is timely and accurate. A Meduza editor reviews every draft before publication.If you find any errors in this translation, please contact us at [email protected].To read Meduza’s exclusive content in English, please subscribe to our newsletter.Meduza