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With Russia increasing disruption to European infrastructure in orbit, including jamming, and monitoring of essential European satellites, and the possibilities of using nuclear weapons against them, officials are warning Vladimir Putin might take war into space.
Earlier this year, Russia moved satellites close to a radar satellite, operated by a Finnish-Polish company, which is used by Ukrainian armed forces to support intelligence.
Experts at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) claim this may either be intimidation tactics, to gather intelligence, to jam data, or to destroy it.
Russia has also recently been accused of causing GPS disruption across Europe, according to scientists, who found jamming in Europe, Greenland, and Canada.
Recent research on GPS disruption published earlier this month claims a group of Russian satellites were found to have been in the same area at the time of disruption.
This is not the first time Russia has been accused of intercepting communications from European satellites, with cases reported since the initial invasion of Ukraine in 2014.
Russian satellites are said to have come within a few kilometres of European spacecraft, with their actions in space compared to their mapping and targeting of undersea cables.
There have also been recent tensions on the International Space Station between Russian and American astronauts.
In early June, after air leaks were detected in a Russian segment of the space station, Russian cosmonauts planned to saw off a metal bracket to access the area.
The American astronauts expressed fears this would cause further danger to the structure, and NASA ordered them to shelter in their own spacecraft. This caused the Russians to abandon the plan.
These recent space tensions have also stoked long-standing fears of Russia’s potential deployment of nuclear weapons in space, breaking the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade weapons of mass destruction in orbit.