The capsule landed at 17:46 local time (11:46 GMT) in the steppes of this huge Central Asian country, according to the television broadcast of Roscosmos.
Roscosmos said in a statement that 218 kilograms of cargo, including the results of scientific experiments, were transported aboard the Soyuz MS-22, which landed southeast of the central city of Jezkazgan.
This spacecraft, which was originally supposed to bring back to Earth American astronaut Frank Rubio and Russian cosmonauts Sergei Prokopiev and Dmitry Petelin, had suffered a spectacular coolant leak.
ISS: damaged Soyuz spacecraft returns to Earth © Lucie FONTAINE / AFP
This incident is due to the impact of a micrometeorite according to Moscow, which had decided to send the MS-23 spacecraft as a replacement.
The coolant leak had led to concerns about the temperature that could be reached inside the ship when it returned to Earth.
The three members of MS-22, who took off at the end of September 2022, were supposed to return to Earth at the end of March, but will not finally be repatriated until next September.
A leak similar to the December incident also hit another Russian spacecraft, the Progress MS-21 cargo ship, docked to the ISS since October, in mid-February. But it was not meant to carry passengers, and it undocked last week.
The damaged Soyuz MS-22 spacecraft after landing empty in Kazakhstan, March 28, 2023 © Ivan Timoshenko / Russian Space Agency Roscosmos / AFP
The ISS is one of the few fields of cooperation still ongoing between Moscow and Washington since the beginning of the Russian offensive in Ukraine and the international sanctions that followed.
© 2023 AFP