Putin thanks Belarusian President Lukashenko for his support for Ukraine invasion
Russia's President Vladimir Putin and Belarus' President Alexander Lukashenko have just reaffirmed their commitment to closer bilateral economic, technological and security cooperation after meeting last weekend in the Russian resort of Sochi on the Black Sea coast.
Russia's main political, economic and military ally in Europe, the meeting between the two leaders allowed Putin to confirm to Lukashenko that his armed forces plan to begin deploying tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus between 7 and 8 July. This is just days before the summit of heads of state and government of the Atlantic Alliance countries, scheduled for 11-12 July in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital.
The positioning of Russian nuclear warheads on Belarusian territory is neither coincidental nor gratuitous. President Lukashenko, who will be 69 in August, is Putin's biggest supporter in his illegal invasion of Ukraine, and his support will pay off in several spheres of activity, space being one of the main ones.
Moscow and Minsk have agreed that a young Belarusian woman will be the first citizen of the Eastern European country to become a cosmonaut. Russia's space agency, Roscosmos, will undertake her education and training, take her to the International Space Station (ISS), facilitate on-board experiments and bring her back to Earth for the greater glory of Lukashenko, who has been in power since July 1994.
A stewardess for the state airline
According to the Belarusian National Academy of Sciences' Aerospace Department, headed by 70-year-old economist Vladimir Gusakov, around 3,000 applications were submitted to the call for applications, according to the institution itself. The short list of those shortlisted was reduced last December to six young women: two stewardesses for the state airline Belavia, a forensic doctor, a gynaecologist, a paediatric surgeon and a research chemist.
The half-dozen girls were sent to Moscow's Cosmonaut Training Centre (TsPK) to undergo a wide range of psychological, medical, intelligence, sociability and critical behaviour tests to determine their suitability for outer space flight.
Lukashenko travelled to Moscow to meet the six candidates. He reassured them that those who are not designated to fly on the first mission will fly on subsequent missions. "Your aspirations will not be discarded, don't worry," he told them. "Those who do not go into space in 2024 will go later and live in the Russian-Belarusian segment of the future ROS orbital complex that Roscosmos has under development. There will be enough work for all of them," he reassured them.
The one finally chosen to be trained as a regular cosmonaut is Marina Vasilevskaya, one of Belavia's stewardesses. Anastasia Lenkova, a paediatric surgeon working at the Scientific and Practical Centre of Paediatric Surgery in Minsk, has been nominated to replace her in case of unforeseen circumstances. Both will be trained to carry out the ten or so experiments in biotechnology and medicine on board the ISS in the scientific programme devised by the Belarusian Academy of Sciences.
Training begins in a few weeks
NASA and Roscosmos have already agreed that Marina Vasilevskaya will fly in March 2024 in the Soyuz MS-25 space capsule. The chief commander of the mission has been handpicked. He is Russian Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Oleg Novitsky, a Belarusian by birth but a naturalised Russian citizen, who has three space voyages under his belt. Joining them both as flight engineer will be American astronaut Tracy Caldwell Dyson, who has been to the ISS twice.
The head of Russia's manned space programme, former Russian astronaut Sergei Krikaliov, who has six space missions under his belt - two on the Russian Mir orbital complex, two on the US space shuttle and two on the ISS - has confirmed that Marina Vasilevskaya's training will begin at TsPK in Moscow in late summer or early autumn.
The Lukashenko government is in the process of expanding its space industrial fabric in the shadow of the Complex-SG, Resource-SG and Kosmodozor-SG programmes covering the period 2024-2028. With the contribution of Russian companies, the president of the aforementioned Academy of Sciences, Gusakov, said on 10 April that one of the "most ambitious" initiatives is to "build the orbital and ground infrastructure of an Earth observation system based on an ultra-high-resolution remote sensing satellite".
Sergei Zolotoi, Director of Geo-information Systems at the Academy of Sciences, also announced that the Minsk government is finalising studies to participate with Russia in a "joint project of small satellites dedicated to civil and military applications". If realised, it would be part of a bilateral constellation to be deployed starting in 2028.
