MOSCOW, October 25. /TASS/. Combat in near-Earth outer space is a scenario that is entirely plausible, Oleg Kononenko, deputy chief of the Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center and commander of the Roscosmos cosmonaut squad, said.
Kononenko, who is also a TASS special correspondent on the International Space Station (ISS), said: "Even though it’s not something I’d wish for, a war spreading to space is quite likely and plausible. The UN is issuing decisions on not deploying weapons in space, on not deploying nuclear arms in space, on not taking down somebody else’s satellites, but I think that probably, at some point, this may still happen," he said in an interview with Rossiya-24 television.
In December 2022, the UN General Assembly approved a Russia-sponsored resolution to ban first placement of weapons in outer space. It found support among 122 countries, while 50 voted against it and four abstained. In January, Russian state aerospace corporation Roscosmos said that the Russian delegation at the UN was promoting the position that there is a need for drafting a document on preventing an arms race in space.