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.

The latter regularly shows his support for what Russia calls "a special military operation" in Ukraine.

"Ours! For the first time in many years, it's an all-Russian crew," he said on Twitter a few hours before the launch.

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, this could cause "+ the ditching + or + the landing + of the ISS weighing 500 tons", he had warned.

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.

Medal refused

Mr. Rogozin also had an exchange with the whimsical billionaire Elon Musk, founder of the space company SpaceX, who had challenged Vladimir Putin on Monday by offering him on Twitter a "man to man fight" with Ukraine as the stake.

"Elon, get out of the toilet so we can talk a little," Mr. Rogozin tweeted, referring to a message from the billionaire in which he said he wrote at least 50% of his tweets on a "porcelain throne".

On board the ISS, Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts avoided talking about the conflict which has already claimed thousands of lives and caused one of the largest refugee crises in Europe since World War II.

But astronaut Mark Vande Hei took the brunt of the war of words between Russia and the West, when Roscosmos released a video jokingly saying he could stay on the ISS instead of returning to earth aboard a Soyuz rocket on March 30.

Scott Kelly, another NASA astronaut whose record for consecutive days spent in space was broken by Mark Vande Hei this week, responded to the joke by refusing a medal awarded to him by the Russian government.

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.

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

© 2022 AFP