Four Russian military satellites have sidled into the orbital lane of an ICEYE radar bird used by Ukraine and its allies.
According to Ars Technica more than four Russian military satellites changed their orbits last week to match a Finnish-American radar surveillance satellite. That has raised awkward questions about what Moscow is playing at above Earth.
The moves were spotted through open-source orbital tracking data. Retired Air Force space intelligence officer Greg Gillinger revealed the changes in a special edition of his Integrity Flash newsletter.
The Russian satellites, named Kosmos 2610 through 2613, launched together on 16 April 2026. They rode a Soyuz-2.1b rocket from Plesetsk Cosmodrome in northern Russia.
During the past week, the four satellites nudged their orbital inclinations by less than one degree.
The velocity change required for such a move is equivalent to a gain in altitude of more than 100 miles.
As a result, the Russian craft can now regularly pass near ICEYE-X36. That satellite belongs to ICEYE, a Finnish-American outfit providing radar surveillance imagery to the US military and European governments.
ICEYE provides imagery to Ukraine’s military in its fight against Russia. ICEYE co-founder and chief executive Rafal Modrzewski met Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy last year.
Gillinger said cross-track distances between the Russian satellites and ICEYE-X36 now range from about 500 metres to 22 kilometres. All of this is happening in polar orbit at roughly 547 kilometres up.
Russian operators are now positioned to close in on the ICEYE satellite with “minor adjustments” in “satellite eccentricity and average altitudes,” Gillinger wrote.
A fifth satellite from the same Russian launch now appears to be making similar moves. That makes the whole thing look more like deliberate stalking.
Nobody outside the usual classified bunkers knows exactly what these Kosmos satellites can do. They may be another bit of Russian sabre-rattling. Russian military aircraft have long probed US and European airspace.
US officials believe some Russian satellites are part of an anti-satellite weapons programme. Similar Russian craft have shadowed sophisticated US spy satellites several hundred miles above Earth.
More recently, a mysterious Russian military satellite turned up in geosynchronous orbit, more than 22,000 miles above the equator. The US Space Force sent one of its own inspection satellites to have a nose.
Taking out one ICEYE satellite would not stop Ukraine or Western governments from getting radar imagery. ICEYE operates dozens more radar satellites, and unlike optical satellites, radar works through clouds and darkness.
Gillinger wrote: “We do not know Russia’s intentions or the capabilities of these particular satellites. However, manoeuvring into a co-planar orbit is alarming. Plane matching is the first (and most fuel-expensive) step in conducting Rendezvous Proximity Operations (RPO), likely necessary for the Russian satellites to target ICEYE-X36 (kinetically or non-kinetically). We also do not know the satellites’ total fuel capacity; the expenditure during these manoeuvres indicates that the satellites are capable of performing high-energy manoeuvres.
ICEYE did not respond to questions, but said in January it was expanding its partnership with Ukraine’s military. Its newest satellites can capture images with a resolution of up to 16 centimetres, about the size of a grapefruit, which is handy if you want snaps of fruit from space.
