Russia will withdraw from the International Space Station project “after 2024” after fulfilling its obligations, the Kremlin said after a meeting between newly appointed head of Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “You know that we work in the framework of international cooperation on the International Space Station. Undoubtedly, we will fulfill all our obligations to our partners, but the decision to abandon the station after 2024 has been made,” Borisov told Putin in the statement issued by the Kremlin. “I think right now, we’re going to start forming the Russian orbital station,” Borisov said. Russia’s withdrawal would be a major blow to the ISS, a model of international cooperation for decades. The announcement comes as the war in Ukraine has deeply strained its relations with the US and Europe. Robin Gatens, director of the International Space Station for NASA, said NASA had not received any official word from Russia about the decision to abandon the ISS. “The Russians, like us, are thinking about what’s next for them. As we plan the transition after 2030 to commercial space stations in low Earth orbit, they have a similar plan. And so they are thinking about that transition as well. We have not received any official update from the partner on the news today, so we’ll talk more about their plan going forward,” Gatens said. This is not the first time Russia has threatened to abandon the ISS amid crippling US and European sanctions over the war in Ukraine. Borissov’s predecessor, Dmitry Rogozin, repeatedly threatened to do so before he was ousted earlier this month. But this latest threat has more teeth and the apparent approval of Putin himself. According to a transcript of a meeting posted on the Kremlin’s website, Putin said “good” after Borisov told him that Roscosmos would start building its own space station after 2024. Russia’s withdrawal would be a major blow to the ISS, a model of international cooperation for decades. The news comes less than two weeks after NASA and Roscosmos announced a crew swap, or “seat swap,” deal that had been under negotiation for more than four years. Starting in September, two Russian cosmonauts will launch on American spacecraft from Florida, while two American astronauts will pilot Russian rockets into space. It is unclear whether Russia’s decision to withdraw from the ISS after 2024 will affect the crew exchange agreement. The ISS, which is a collaboration between the US, Russia, Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency, is divided into two segments — the Russian Orbital Segment and the US Orbital Segment. The Biden administration announced in December that it had committed to extending the ISS from 2024 to 2030. But Russia — NASA’s number one partner on the ISS — never signed on. “The Russian part can’t operate without the electricity on the American side, and the American side can’t operate without the propulsion systems that are on the Russian side,” former NASA astronaut Garrett Raisman told CNN in February. “So you can’t do an amicable divorce. You can’t do a conscious disconnect.” Since then, NASA has been exploring ways to move the space station without the help of the Russian part. In June, a Cygnus cargo spacecraft demonstrated its ability to raise the station’s orbit. But whether the ISS could survive without the Russians remains an open question. NASA said in February that it plans to continue operating the International Space Station — which launched in 2000 — until the end of 2030, after which the ISS will be de-orbited and crash-landed in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean. Commercial space platforms will replace the ISS as a place for collaboration and scientific research, NASA said. Listen to the director general of the European Space Agency here:
