A Russian military satellite has manoeuvred to within metres of a US-registered radar satellite believed to provide intelligence to Ukraine, according to space-tracking data reported by The War Zone, a US defence news site. Cosmos 2612 may have passed ICEYE-X36, a satellite owned by the US arm of the Finnish company ICEYE. LeoLabs, a US space-tracking company, put the closest approach at about 500 metres, according to Breaking Defence.
ICEYE has supplied radar imagery to Ukraine since 2022, Defence News reported. So is Russia stalking satellites which help Ukraine from space? Al Jazeera spoke to analysts to find out: A Russian satellite has deliberately positioned itself close to a Western one, after months of manoeuvring.
Cosmos 2612 is one of six satellites the Russian military launched in April, The War Zone reported. In May, four of them moved close to an ICEYE satellite. ICEYE-X36 is a commercial satellite, owned by a private company rather than a government, but ICEYE sells radar imagery to militaries and supplies data to the US and its allies.
ICEYE’s chief executive, Rafal Modrzewski, told the news agency the company then moved its own satellite, which appeared to prompt further Russian manoeuvres. Then, between Thursday and Friday last week, Cosmos 2612 closed in from more than 320km (200 miles) from ICEYE-X36 to about 4.8km (3 miles), the space-tracking company LeoLabs told the news site Axios. Over the weekend, it moved between positions ahead of and behind the ICEYE satellite, at times coming within roughly 500 metres, LeoLabs said in a report on Monday, adding that the estimate was uncertain and, by Monday, it had begun to move away.
A Ukrainian official told Axios that Ukraine’s military works with ICEYE and uses its capabilities, but said it was unclear whether ICEYE-X36 itself supports Ukraine. In the past, Russia has mainly carried out such manoeuvres against Western military satellites, rather than commercially owned ones, Mark Hilborne, a senior lecturer in the defence studies department at King’s College London, told Al Jazeera. In early 2020, two Russian satellites moved close to USA 245, a US spy satellite.
In September 2025, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said two Russian Luch-Olymp satellites were tracking two Intelsat satellites used by the German military. Close approaches have happened for years, but not like this. Hilborne said this is “the first time that a country has done such a manoeuvre … against the commercial satellite without any consent”.
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