Russia is practically left without a satellite system that tracked nuclear missile launches

Launch of a Soyuz-2.1b rocket with the EKS-3 "Tundra" satellite from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Arkhangelsk Oblast. Photo: nasaspaceflight.com

The constellation, which Russia began creating in 2015 as a replacement for the Soviet "Oko" system, almost simultaneously lost two spacecraft: "Kosmos-2541", launched in September 2019, and "Kosmos-2563", put into orbit in November 2022. The first last corrected its orbit in March, the second in July. This, according to the expert, may indicate serious technical problems.

The only satellite of the system that currently shows no obvious signs of malfunction remains "Kosmos-2552". It was supposed to perform an orbit correction in November 2025, but such a maneuver has not yet been recorded. Nevertheless, as Podvig notes, it is too early to draw final conclusions about its failure.

Space expert Anatoly Zak believes that Russia is failing to restore the missile attack early warning system, created back in Soviet times. He names international sanctions and financial problems of the space industry, which is unable to produce the required number of new satellites, as the most likely reasons for this.

In 2024, Russia conducted only 17 space launches — the lowest figure since the early 1960s. Compared to 2013, the number of launches has almost halved. As a result, the country dropped from first place to third in the number of launches, yielding to the USA and China. According to space popularizer Vitaly Egorov, in 2025, Russia was for the first time caught up by New Zealand in this indicator — also with 17 launches. Russia lagged five times behind China, which conducted 90 launches, and more than ten times behind the USA.

At the end of 2023, then-head of "Roscosmos" Yuri Borisov announced plans to produce and launch up to 250 satellites per year. His successor Dmitry Bakanov, in the summer of 2025, promised to put more than a thousand spacecraft into orbit by 2030.

However, according to Ivan Moiseev, scientific director of the Institute of Space Policy, in reality, Russia has almost no chance of catching up with the leaders. As of 2025, it had 307 satellites in orbit — several times fewer than China, and dozens of times fewer than the USA.

Such a lag, the expert emphasizes, cannot be eliminated without broad international cooperation. At the same time, attempts to establish cooperation with China are not bearing fruit: Beijing prefers to develop its own programs independently. According to Moiseev, without changes in the geopolitical situation and conditions of isolation, the prospects for the development of Russian cosmonautics remain very limited.

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