This crew, led by experienced cosmonaut Oleg Artemiev, accompanied by Denis Matveïev and Sergei Korsakov, took off at 3:55 p.m. GMT for a three-hour flight to the ISS, where they will be welcomed by a team of two Russians, four Americans and a German, according to images transmitted by NASA.

Until recently, space cooperation between Russia and Western countries was one of the few areas not to have suffered too much from the sanctions decreed against Moscow after the annexation in 2014 of the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea.

However, some tensions had arisen, especially after Russian President Vladimir Putin appointed nationalist Dmitry Rogozin as head of the Russian space agency Roscosmos in 2018.

According to him, the functioning of the Russian vessels supplying the ISS will be disrupted by the sanctions, thus affecting the Russian segment of the station.

As a result, it could cause "+ the ditching + or + the landing + of the ISS weighing 500 tons", he warned on March 12.

The thrusters of the Russian vessels docked at the station are indeed used to correct the orbit of the space structure.

A procedure carried out ten times a year to keep it at the right altitude, or to avoid space debris in its path.

Americans alone do not have this capability, Joel Montalbano, the station's program director for NASA, confirmed Monday.

"The Space Station was designed on the principle of interdependence (...) it is not a process in which one group can become separated from the other."

"At present, there is no indication that our Russian partners want to do things differently. So we plan to continue operations as we do today," he said.

The latest hitch in space cooperation, the European Space Agency (ESA) announced Thursday that it has suspended the Russian-European ExoMars mission and is looking for alternatives for the launch of four other missions due to the offensive. in Ukraine.

A prototype of the Rosalind Franklin rover of the Russian-European space mission ExoMars presented, February 7, 2019 in Stevenage, United Kingdom BEN STANSALL AFP / Archives

Dmitry Rogozin criticized "a very bitter event" and said that Russia could carry out this mission alone, "in a few years".

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