{"id":43280,"date":"2026-05-01T21:13:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-01T13:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/russia-cloaks-launch-schedule-after-spaceport-falls-in-ukraines-sights\/"},"modified":"2026-05-01T21:13:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T13:13:10","slug":"russia-cloaks-launch-schedule-after-spaceport-falls-in-ukraines-sights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/russia-cloaks-launch-schedule-after-spaceport-falls-in-ukraines-sights\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia cloaks launch schedule after spaceport falls in Ukraine\u2019s sights"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you believe official Russian reports, the country\u2019s northern spaceport has come under attack from drones on multiple occasions in the last few months.<\/p>\n

The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data relay satellites akin to SpaceX\u2019s Starlink, a space-based network underpinning much of Ukraine\u2019s military communications infrastructure. Plesetsk is a military base located in Russia\u2019s Arkhangelsk region, some 500 miles north of Moscow.<\/p>\n

The Russian space agency\u2019s first acknowledgment of an attempted drone attack at Plesetsk came a few weeks ago, when the head of Roscosmos, the Russian state corporation for civilian spaceflight, met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin.<\/p>\n

Dmitry Bakanov, the general director of Roscosmos, regaled Putin with a list of Russia\u2019s recent accomplishments in the space sector. The list was modest, at least by the standards of an established space power, with 17 launches in 2025, a distant third to the United States and China.<\/p>\n

\u201cSerious inbound attempts\u201d<\/h2>\n

Then the general director of Roscosmos told Putin about \u201cperhaps the most exciting event\u201d for Russia\u2019s space program in the last year. This was the launch on March 23 of the first batch of communications satellites for Russia\u2019s own version of Starlink. This network, called Rassvet, is undergoing development by a company called Bureau 1440, which the Russian government has backed with more than $1.2 billion. The network\u2019s first 16 operational satellites launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome aboard a Soyuz-2.1b rocket.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur \u2018friends\u2019 did everything they could to prevent this launch from taking place,\u201d Bakanov claimed in the April 11 meeting with Putin. \u201cWe had serious inbound attempts to the cosmodrome that day, but nevertheless, the joint combat crews of Roscosmos and the Space Forces accomplished their mission.\u201d<\/p>\n

The administration of the city of Mirny, the closest town to Plesetsk, warned of a \u201cdrone threat\u201d to the region between March 22 and 25 on an official social media account. Local citizens replied to the warning, suggesting Internet connections in the town were cut. City officials said the \u201ctemporary restrictions\u201d on mobile Internet service were \u201cnecessitated by security measures aimed at protecting citizens and critical infrastructure.\u201d<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

Three months earlier, in December, local Russian news outlets reported another attempted drone attack at Plesetsk. This one reportedly occurred around the time of the launch of a Soyuz-2.1a rocket on December 25 with a radar observation satellite designed to provide Russia\u2019s government with all-weather reconnaissance imagery.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Debris from a downed drone near Plesetsk Cosmodrome in December.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Plesetsk Cosmodrome Press Service via Mirny Administration<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

A local news organization, News29.ru, published a photo it claimed showed a destroyed drone near Plesetsk. Reports by News29.ru and another regional news website, Kareliainform.ru, suggested multiple drones were part of the attempted strike on Plesetsk. \u201cThe targets were detected and neutralized in a timely manner,\u201d Kareliainform.ru reported.<\/p>\n

A statement attributed to the Cosmodrome Press Service was posted on Mirny\u2019s social media page: \u201cThe Cosmodrome Command expresses its appreciation for the vigilance and high sense of civic responsibility demonstrated by residents of the Plesetsk and Kargopol districts of the Arkhangelsk Region upon detecting unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying toward the cosmodrome\u2019s operational zone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe timely receipt of information regarding the detection of these UAVs\u2014and their flight trajectory\u2014made it possible to prevent damage to the Cosmodrome\u2019s military infrastructure facilities and to save lives,\u201d the statement said.<\/p>\n

\u201cLegitimate target\u201d<\/h2>\n

Russian officials did not identify the source of the drones, but Russia\u2019s defense ministry has ascribed other drone swarms in the Arkhangelsk region to Ukraine, some 800 miles away. Ukrainian drones have routinely struck deep into Russian territory, hitting Russian military bases, oil refineries, and the Russian capital. Russia is scaling back its annual Victory Day parade in Red Square next month due to the threat of a Ukrainian drone attack.<\/p>\n

Russia makes no secret of Plesetsk\u2019s importance for the country\u2019s military.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is particularly important to note that the success of the Special Military Operation is embedded in every launch conducted from this spaceport,\u201d the cosmodrome\u2019s acting chief, Dmitry Demin, said in public remarks earlier this month celebrating the 65th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin becoming the first person to fly into space.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

Special military operation is Russia\u2019s official euphemism for the country\u2019s invasion of Ukraine. A Russian diplomat in 2022 suggested that civilian satellites, such as Starlink, used by Ukraine could become \u201clegitimate targets\u201d for Russian retaliation. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that Ukraine has its sights set on the Plesetsk Cosmodrome.<\/p>\n

Since the reported drone incursions, the Russian government put a tighter lid on information about its launches from Plesetsk. Authorities typically publish airspace warning notices called NOTAMs advising pilots to steer clear of a rocket\u2019s flight path and downrange drop zones where spent booster rockets fall back to Earth. These NOTAMs usually cover a few minutes to a few hours for a primary launch date, and perhaps a backup date in the event of a delay. US and Chinese authorities release similar notices for their space launches.<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A Soyuz-2.1a rocket awaits liftoff from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia on December 25, 2025.<\/p>\n

Credit:
\n Russian Ministry of Defense<\/p>\n<\/figure>\n

The notices accompanying the most recent launches from Plesetsk covered much longer time periods, with daily windows of up to 10 hours over up to 14 consecutive days. And it appears as if Russian space officials are not necessarily aiming to launch at the first opportunity within these expanded windows. For example, a Soyuz launch from Plesetsk in February took off on the fourth day of a 10-day warning period. The next Soyuz launch from Plesetsk, with the first cluster of Rassvet broadband satellites, occurred more than six hours into a 10-hour window on the fifth day of a nine-day warning period.<\/p>\n

The official public warnings for the next Soyuz rocket launch from Plesetsk were even more ambiguous, covering various periods between April 1 and 15. The launch went off on April 3, likely carrying a Russian military communications satellite into a high-altitude orbit.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo there seems to be a new policy to issue much vaguer NOTAMs that make it much more difficult to predict the exact launch day and launch time (whether that is enough to fool intelligence agencies is, of course, another matter),\u201d Bart Hendrickx, an expert on Russia\u2019s space program and a professor at Ghent University in Belgium, wrote in an email to Ars. \u201cI don\u2019t think it\u2019s a coincidence that this new policy was introduced after the December 25 attack.\u201d<\/p>\n

Please stay away<\/h2>\n

Russian officials released strange overlapping airspace and maritime warning notices for two different launches from Plesetsk sometime between April 13 and April 30, with launch windows for the two missions combining to cover up to 19 hours each day. Essentially, authorities were telling civilian pilots and sailors to remain clear of the warned areas for all but a few hours each day.<\/p>\n

,<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the warnings contain a mix of coordinates for impact zones of both rockets,\u201d Hendrickx wrote on SeeSat-L, a long-running online forum of satellite and launch tracking enthusiasts. \u201cThis may have been done deliberately in an attempt to cover up the dual launch scenario. As has been the case for other launches from Plesetsk this year, the launch periods and daily launch windows in the navigation warnings are unusually long and most likely don\u2019t entirely correspond to the actual launch windows.\u201d<\/p>\n

The overlapping warning notices \u201ccreated the impression that they were for a single launch,\u201d Hendrickx told Ars.<\/p>\n

The first of these two cloaked launches departed from Plesetsk on April 16, when a Soyuz-2.1b rocket placed eight classified Russian military satellites into orbit for an unknown purpose. A week later, on April 23, a smaller Angara-1.2 rocket launched from the cosmodrome with a quartet of suspected military spy satellites. Russian government officials announced the launches and posted photos of them after confirming their success.<\/p>\n

Plesetsk\u2019s first few months of 2026 have been the busiest period for space launches at the cosmodrome since 2022. Dozens more launches will be required to fully deploy the Rassvet constellation, which Russian officials say will number 900 satellites by 2035. Russia\u2019s Nivelir anti-satellite missions also launch from Plesetsk, the primary launch base for Russia\u2019s military space program.<\/p>\n

Seasoned observers of Russia\u2019s space program might question if the drone attacks are a ruse to add another layer of secrecy over Russia\u2019s launch activity at Plesetsk. But Russian officials continue to announce launches after they occur, and, in any event, US and other foreign intelligence agencies keep a close watch on Plesetsk. And Ukraine\u2019s ability to strike fortified locations inside Russia is well-known.<\/p>\n

\u201cBakanov didn\u2019t literally use the words \u2018Ukrainian drone attack\u2019 (too shocking for Putin?), but that\u2019s clearly what he was referring to,\u201d Hendrickx told Ars. \u201cI see no reason why the Russians would lie about these drone attacks, the more so because Putin himself was briefed about at least one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you believe official Russian reports, the country\u2019s northern spaceport has come under attack from drones on multiple occasions in the last few months. The drones did not succeed in striking the spaceport, but the attempted attacks come as Russia ramps up activity at Plesetsk Cosmodrome to deploy a new constellation of Internet and data […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42727,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43280"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}