(Adnkronos) – Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed the head of the space agency Roscosmos, Yuri Borisov, who had been deputy defense minister under Sergei Shoigu, without specifying the reason. He appointed Deputy Transport Minister Dmitry Bakanov to replace him.
Bakanov, 39, was previously at the helm of the Low Earth Orbit Satellite System, which manages the Gonets constellation of civilian communications satellites (between 2011 and 2019). Borisov was appointed to head the Russian space agency in 2022, replacing politician Dmitry Rogozin. Gonets, a project comparable to Starlink, had been a partner of OneWeb, Eutelsat’s global communications satellite network, from which Moscow withdrew in 2018 after the FSB denounced it as a national security risk.
In August 2023, under Borisov’s management, the Luna-25 probe crashed on the lunar surface during landing. Also under his leadership, Roscosmos launched the development of the new space station to replace the International Space Station, where the United States and Russia have collaborated closely and continued to do so even after the start of the invasion of Ukraine by Moscow’s forces. The first two modules of the new station will be launched into orbit in 2027. After Shoigu’s dismissal last year, an unprecedented purge of the Defense Ministry was launched, with dozens of arrests, including three former deputy defense ministers, starting with Timur Ivanov, the dismantling of the entire ‘Sholigu clan’ within the Russian elite.
