Some 550 kilometres above the Earth, a quiet chase is reaching its climax. Russia’s Cosmos 2612 has steered itself to within a few kilometres of ICEYE-X36, a US-registered commercial radar satellite run by a company with Finnish roots that sells imagery to Ukraine’s defence ministry.
LeoLabs, which monitors objects in orbit, judged the movement to be intentional – “a deliberate approach”, in its words. Within a single day the gap shrank from more than 320 kilometres to roughly five. LeoLabs stressed that it could not judge the purpose, but called the behaviour rare for low Earth orbit and said it deserved close watching. An independent tracking site projected that the two could pass within about 21 metres of each other on Sunday around 12:30 Berlin time, though it cautioned that such figures carry large uncertainties and are no collision forecast.
What alarms analysts is the effort involved. Cosmos 2612 was one of six satellites Russia sent up in April. In May, five of them burned large amounts of fuel to tilt their orbits into the same plane as the ICEYE craft, according to the Washington think tank CSIS. Since 30 September, Cosmos 2612 has fired its engines repeatedly to line up again, now at almost the same altitude.
CSIS space expert Clayton Swope described the separation to Axios as practically “bumper-to-bumper”. Aaron Brynildson, who teaches space law at Ole Miss, pointed out that countries normally leave a buffer of some ten kilometres, because simultaneous manoeuvres at closer range raise the risk of a crash.
Moscow has form here: in 2020 Cosmos 2543 released a fast-moving object that Washington and London condemned as weapon-like. Neither the US Defense Department nor ICEYE would say anything. A Ukrainian official said Kyiv’s military had not been aware of the latest movements. The CSIS authors want Washington and European capitals to make clear in advance what price Moscow would pay for an attack in space.
