Is Vladimir Putin on the point of taking war into space? | News World

With Russia increasing disruption to European infrastructure in orbit, including jamming, and monitoring of essential European satellites, and the probabilities of using nuclear weapons against them, officials are warning Vladimir Putin might take war into space.

Earlier this 12 months, Russia moved satellites near a radar satellite, operated by a Finnish-Polish company, which is utilized by Ukrainian armed forces to support intelligence.

Experts on the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) claim this will either be intimidation tactics, to collect intelligence, to jam data, or to destroy it.

Russia has also recently been accused of causing GPS disruption across Europe, based on scientists, who found jamming in Europe, Greenland, and Canada.

Recent research on GPS disruption published earlier this month claims a gaggle of Russian satellites were found to have been in the identical area on the time of disruption.

This isn’t the primary time Russia has been accused of intercepting communications from European satellites, with cases reported because the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

Russian satellites are said to have come inside a couple of kilometres of European spacecraft, with their actions in space in comparison with their mapping and targeting of undersea cables.

There have also been recent tensions on the International Space Station between Russian and American astronauts.

In early June, after air leaks were detected in a Russian segment of the space station, Russian cosmonauts planned to saw off a metal bracket to access the realm.

The American astronauts expressed fears this is able to cause further danger to the structure, and NASA ordered them to shelter in their very own spacecraft. This caused the Russians to desert the plan.

These recent space tensions have also stoked long-standing fears of Russia’s potential deployment of nuclear weapons in space, breaking the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade weapons of mass destruction in orbit.

German Major General Michael Traut warned that Russia is perhaps working on technology to put nuclear devices in orbit, which, if detonated, would devastate global infrastructure.

Particularly in danger can be low-earth orbit satellites, orbiting at lower than 1200 miles above Earth.

Traut estimated as much as one-third is perhaps unable to work after a blast, which might shoot out an electromagnetic pulse, destroying global communications, GPS, banking, and military command.

This could also cause space debris, making a domino effect of further collisions.

Traut’s worries echo warnings expressed by other global leaders, including Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte, over the hazards of Russian nuclear weapons in space.

In 2024, Russia also vetoed a UN resolution that called for member states to not develop nuclear weapons, or other weapons of mass destruction, in space.

In response to fears about space war, countries the world over are embracing space defence.

Last 12 months, Germany announced it might be investing 35billion Euros into space technologies, including jammers, lasers, and protective spaceplanes.

It also recently proposed plans to create a coordinated European military space command, alongside countries including Austria, Switzerland, and Luxembourg, to complement existing European Union space defence, including the secure communications system IRIS2.

Meanwhile, France and Poland have recently agreed to collaborate on a telecommunications satellite for the Polish military – a key element of defence in Europe, given Poland’s position on the border with Ukraine.

A part of Europe’s aim to develop its own satellite services is resulting from concerns about its total reliance on Starlink, given worries concerning the unpredictability of its owner, Elon Musk.

In Britain, the 2025 Ministry of Defence’s Strategic Defence Review claimed the nation must focus more on space domains in defence.

The report said that space was ‘a critical national infrastructure sector, a site of growing competition, and a site that’s central to warfighting’. It claimed the ‘combined operational satellite fleets of China and Russia grew by 70% in 2019-21’ and warned that ‘each countries have sought to weaponise space’.

The report also claimed that ‘defence must improve its ability to discourage threats to, and if obligatory protect, its interest in space’.

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